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WAR: ITS NATURE,
CAUSE AND CURE

THE CHOICE BEFORE US

"There are many pages in this volume
which express admirably the opinions of
calm, clear-thinking men." — Times.

"A noble book, which everyone should
read." — Daily News.

'* One of Mr. Dickinson's best-written
and best-reasoned performances." — Saturday
Review.

" Is essentially the utterance of a resolute
individualism." — Nation,

" There is no denying his high-mindedness,
and the clearness of his thought." — Land and
Water.

WAR: ITS NATURE,
CAUSE AND CURE

G. LOWES DICKINSON

Author of '■'■ A Modern Symposium" " The Letters of

John Chinaman" " The European

Anarchy" etc.^ etc.

I ?M 5 i 5

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE, 4.0 MUSEUM STREET, W,C. 1

SV'-

\.t

" i \

First prinUd in igs^

Printed in Great Britain by
VNWIN BROTIIKRS, LIMITBD. THB ORBSHAM PRB8S, LONDON AND WOKINC;

PREFACE

If an author could choose his audience, I would
choose that the following pages should be read
by men, and especially young men, who have served
in the Army and Navy. To those who already
see and feel the menace of modern war, and under-
stand its causes, I have nothing new to say. To
militarists, who neither see nor feel, it is idle to
speak. But the country is full of young men who
are open to the truth, if they had the leisure, the
opportunity and the desire to seek it. And to
them, in the hope that this book may fall into
their hands, I am writing this word of preface.
Some of them, perhaps many of them, will have
found in war something which they prize and prize
rightly. The following passages give some expres-
sion to it. A young officer \\Tites to me in a
private letter :

" I should not stress too much the horror of
war to those who actually took part in it. I
know my experiences were with an exceptionally
united and successful body of men, and that to
many the war was plain hell. But there was, to
many of us, very much on the other side. Nor
was this a joy in the actual fighting, nor a fascina-

6 WAR: ITS NATURE,

tion with tawdry romance. There were greater
things. You may say we were spiritually drugged
and pathetically deluded. But never before or
since have we found them. There was an exalta-
tion, in those days of comradeship and dedication,
that would have come to few in other ways. And
so, to those of us who have ridden with Don
Quixote and Rupert Brooke on either hand, the
Line is sacred ground, for there we saw the vision
splendid."

The other passage is from an unpublished diary
and reads as follows :

" I had in this company a sense of union, of
identity, of complete at -oneness and a strength of
pure affection which I have never felt for anyone
else. Really, I loved without mawkishness or
sentimentahty and untouched by any feeling of
sex or inspiration of an ulterior motive. It
seemed a natural love welling up from the heart,
because it must, like the love that is supposed to
exist between' a mother and son, and a sister and
brother. It was a spontaneous emotion, an active
state unconnected with personal attributes but
existing between us because I was I and they were
they. It was a personal devotion ideally expressed
by ' greater love hath no man than this, that he
lay down his life for another.' I think that is
one of the good points of war, that it makes you
true to others and go outside yourself where he
who stands alone is lost. I suppose that is as good

CAUSE AND CURE 7

for character as the Army is bad. The form has
spoilt the spirit, Hke the difference between Christ's
word and what the Churches have made out of it."
I leave these words without comment. They
are the record of genuine experience which it is
no part of my case to belittle or deny. But the
wi iters, I know, would not suppose that such
experiences justify war. They are only something
to be set against its evils. What those evils are,
and will be, I have tried to set forth here. And
also, which may weigh more with some minds, I
have shown what the causes of war really are.
It is, to my mind, no exaggeration, but a plain
truth, that war and civilisation henceforth are in-
compatible. I would myself go further. I think
that the very existence of mankind is incompatible
with that further development of methods of
destruction on which science is actually engaged.
Yet I see little evidence that this truth is grasped
by most men or women. No subject is more
unpopular, to think or talk about, than war. And
the soldiers and diplomats, while their peoples
attend to other things, are renewing the whole
apparatus of policy which led to the last and must
lead to the next catastrophe. I do not see how
this is to be met, except by ordinary men and
women giving their minds to the real facts. And
among those, one would suppose, the most active
should be those who know by experience what
modern war is like. I will conclude by a passage

8 WAR; ITS NATURE,

from a book I cite more than once in what
follows, Mr. C. E. Montague's Disenchantment : —
" There is only one thing for it. There must
still be five or six million ex-soldiers. They are
the most determined peace-party that ever existed
in Britain. Let them clap the only darbies they
have — the Covenant of the League of Nations —
on to the wrists of all future poets, romancers and
sages. We must beware in good time of those
boys and elderly fiery men piping in Thessaly."

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. WAR MEANS THE DESTRUCTION OF MANKIND

II. WAR CANNOT BE REGULATED .

III. WHAT SOLDIERS HAVE TO DO .

IV. WHAT THE LOGIC OF WAR APPROVES
V. THE PRESS IN WAR-TIME

VI. SCIENCE AND WAR

VII. HISTORY AND WAR

VIII. THE RESULTS OF WAR

IX. IS WAR INEVITABLE ?

X. WAR AND HUMAN NATURE

XI. THE REAL CAUSES OF THE GREAT WAR

XII. A SIDELIGHT ON THE STATESMEN OF THE WAR

XIII. THE PEACE

XrV. SOME REFLECTIONS BY MR. LLOYD GEORGE

XV. THE OLD POLICIES ARE STILL SUPREME IN

EUROPE

XVI. WHY NOT DISARM ? . . . .

XVII.. THE ECONOMIC MOTIVES FOR WAR .

XVIII. THE ISSUE FOR THE ELECTOR .

XIX. ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES OF A POLICY OF PEACE

XX. POLITICAL PRINCIPLES OF A POLICY OF PEACE

XXI. THE BRITISH EMPIRE

XXII. CONCLUSION

PAGE

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154

WAR: ITS NATURE, CAUSE
AND CURE

My theme may be put in a sentence : — If mankind
does not end war, war will end mankind. This
has not been true in the past. But it is true in
the present. For the present has produced some-
thing new. It has produced science. And if
science is the principal hope of mankind, it is
also the principal menace. For it can destroy as
easily as it can create ; and all that it creates is
useless, if it creates only to destroy. But de-
struction is what war means ; and all its other
meanings are made meaningless by this.

Let me illustrate. On this day, March 22, 1922,
I read in my newspaper a discussion in the House
of Conmions on the Aircraft Force. A member
(says the account) " drew attention to the probable
horrors of the next war. Vast fleets of aeroplanes
would come over our to\\Tis with bombs of 4,000
or 5,000 pounds containing high explosives, poison
gas, and probably cholera germs, and the women

and children in those towns would suffer as much

IS WAR: ITS NATURE,

as the meji engaged in actual warfare." Or take
another statement, by Major-General Seeley, ex-
Minister of War : " Chemical knowledge was now
so far advanced that, with very little trouble and
at very moderate cost, a hundred thousand people
could be blotted out by lethal gas during an air
raid. A great deal of nonsense had been spoken
about wonderful discoveries. The truth was that
the manufacture of the most deadly gases was
easy and inexpensive. It was simple and horrible.
The choice was really between disarmament and
extermination."

Take another testimony by Thomas Edison :
" There exists no means of preventing a flotilla
of aeroplanes from flying over London to-morrow
and spreading a gas that would poison its millions
in three hours. One day science will invent a
machine so terrible in its possibilities, so absolutely
'terrifying that man himself will be appalled and
renounce war for ever."

Mr. Edison's science is probably better than his
knowledge of human nature. The whole question
is, whether that terrible and stupid animal, man,
can in fact be frightened off war by the proof that
it means his destruction in this bestial way.
Perhaps he cannot. But in any case the facts are
clear and indisputable.

In all the principal countries of the world,
after the " war to end war," men of science
are busy investigating methods of destroying by

CAUSE AND CURE 18

war men, women, children, factories, cities, coun-
tries, continents. In part they know how to
do it already, in part they are perfecting their
weapons; and there is no limit to their powers.
This was not true in the past, but it is true in
the present, and it will be truer in the future.
There is the new fact, that puts out of date all
the ordinary discussion of war. War now means
extermination, not of soldiers only, but of civilians
and of civilisation.

14 WAR: ITS NATURE,

But " No/' someone perhaps will say, " we will
not go so far. We will regulate war so that
it shall be waged in the old gentlemanly way.
Then we can have war without universal
destruction." \

But war was regulated before the last war, and
the regulation made no difference. Every weapon
that could be used for destruction was used. " That
was the Germans' fault ! " Well, if you like, it
was. But we imitated them. We made poison
gas, and made it better than they. We made
liquid fire, ajid made it better than they. We
made air raids, and made them better than they.
And if we did not use the submarine to sink
merchant ships, that was only because we could
deal with them as easily without. Did not one
of our most popular heroes, Lord Fisher, write to
the German Admiral Tirpitz : " I don't blame you
for the submarine business. I would have done
the same myself, only our idiots in England
wouldn't believe it when I told 'em "?

It is waste of time to argue about who began
this scientific savagery. There has not been,

CAUSE AND CURE 16

and there will not be, any impartial inquiry. It
is enough for us to know that someone will always
begin it. And if you choose to believe that that
someone will always be not the English, but their
enemies, that belief does not alter the argument.
Someone will do it, and then, by way of " re-
prisals," the others will imitate them. For
" reprisals " mean doing what you think wrong on
the plea that someone else did it first.

Did you notice, the other day, what happened
at Washington? The Powers were discussing the
use of the submarine in war. The British, to
whom imports by sea are more important than
they are to any other nation, who therefore fear
the submarine more than any other nation, and
who also expect always to command the sea, and
thus to be able to cut off an enemy's trade with-
out recourse to the submarine — the British, for
those reasons, proposed the abolition of the sub-
marine. iWhat did the French reply? That the
submarine is a weapon of " defence," not of
" offence," and that they proposed to build an
enormous fleet of them. The British then produced
an article, wTitten by a French Naval Officer, de-
fending all that the Germans did with the
submarine in war. The French thereupon re-
pudiated the article, and a rule was solemnly drawn
up prohibiting the use of submarines as commerce
destroyers. Do you believe that rule will be kept?
If 30, you are credulous.

16 WAR: ITS NATURE,

Similarly, a rule was adopted at Washington pro-
hibiting the use of poison gas. Do you believe
that rule will be kept? It would be interesting to
know which of the nations who signed it — the
Americans, the British, the French, the Italians, the
Japanese — have, since, shut down their establish-
ments for manufacturing poison gas. Have the
EngUsh? Would you feel happy if they had?
Probably not. Probably ,you think we ought to
be " prepared " in case the other fellow breaks the
rule. And so does everybody think. But I will
go further. Suppose we were losing a war, and
thought we could win it by breaking one of these
rules. Would you stand for our losing the war
rather ^han making the breach? And if you would,
would the Press? Would the Music Halls? Would
the War Office? Would the Admiralty? Would
Parliament? You know very well, or, if you do
not, you ought to know, that every nation con-
siders everything right which may secure it from
defeat. I do not know whether those who sign
such conventions as were drawn up at Washington
really believe they will be observed. I should
be surprised if they did. But if they do, then they
are not fit to take in hand the policy of nations.
For they are relying on a broken reed. No rules
to restrain the conduct of war will ever be
observed if victory seems to depend upon the breach
of them.

In truth, the character of the next war must be

CAUSE AND CURE 17

judged not from what governments say, but from
what they do. Watch their actual experimental
work. Watch their constructive work. And be
sure that while war exists it will always be as
destructive as it can be. For war is not now what
once it was in Italy— a game of professionals, in
which both sides agree that it is cheaper not to
kill the combatants. We fight now to kill, and to
kill by every means.

This is so much a matter of course that it is
never even disputed, except when somebody re-
members that the Public must be deceived. Thus,
to return to the debate to which I have referred,
the member who called attention to the menace
involved by future war, also urged the necessity
of defence. And what was his proposal? That
we should build a stronger Air Force than the
expected enemy .(^bat enemy being, by the bye,
that very France which for four and a half years
has been our brother-in-arms). " Our Air
Force," he said, " was ludicrously weak, France
was spending four times as much money on the
Air Service as we were." And obsene, please, the
moral of this. .We must be stronger than France ;
but also, and equally (say the French), France
must be stronger than we. Thus, ever>' increase
on the one side must be met by a greater increase
on the other. And so it is with every arm, and
with every nation. Preparing for war means that
every nation must continually spend more and

18 WAR: ITS NATURE,

more income on making more and more destructive
armaments. It means that armies become bigger,
guns more powerful, gas more poisonous, germs
more potent, and whatever else may be in the
heads of these patient men of science more de-
structive, until the moment comes when all this
preparation explodes into action, And then?
Then, I submit to you, without any behef that I am
exaggerating, then — the end of civilised man.

Every day you, whom I am addressing', go about
your work. You marry yourself, or you marry
your son or your daughter. You plan for the
future. You look forward to life, for yourself, for
your children, for your country. The play, the
music hall, the concert occupy and amuse you.
You read books. You ride in motor-cars. You
travel. You hope and aspire. And all this time,
side by side with you, in this laboratory, at that
harbour, in those barracks, accompanied by cheerful
music, wooed by patriotic songs, the agents of
destruction are at work. They are people, no
doubt, much like others. But their work is to
destroy all that those others are building up ; to
make mockery of all their purposes and hopes ;
to kill, with incredible tortures, incredible numbers
of men. This they are doing as a matter of
course, as a patriotic duty. Surely there is some-
thing very strange about this I Is a nation, after
all, nothing but a crowd of homicidal lunatics?

CAUSE AND CURE 19

III

It is worth while to pause for a moment at that
question. Perhaps the answer is " Yes." Perhaps,
really, men exist to destroy, not to build. I know-
young men who say so, or who almost say so.
And if it be so, the fact cannot be altered by an
odd person, like myself, who happens not to be
homicidal. I cannot answer my own question one
way or the other. But I can at least ask it.
And choosing to suppose (absurdly no doubt), that
I have before me the men of whom I want to
ask it, I will ask it of them one by one.

You, I will suppose, are a sailor. You belong
to the Navy that boasts a tradition finer and
cleaner than that of any other service. Well,
what were you doing in the Great War? One
gallant action was fought, so far as I remember.
One gallant landing attack was made. There may
have been others. You may have been present.
You may be, legitimately enough, proud of the
fact. But this was not a war, as other wars
have been, of naval battles. .What then were
you really doing, most of the time? Main-
taining the blockade, by which, we are sometimes
told, the war was won. Well, what was the

20 WAR: ITS NATURE,

blockade? An attempt to starve to death the
population of Germany, and, in particular (for, of
course, the burden would fall first on them), the
old men, and women, and little children. Believe
me, you were fairly successful in that. I have
been in Germany since the war. I have been at
the hospitals, I have seen the crowds of ricketty
children produced by our blockade. The number
of those who died of hunger, or of the diseases
caused by hunger, is estimated at hundreds of
thousands. That is what you were doing during
the war with Germany. Then, when that war
was over, you did the same thing to Russia, to
our late Ally, to the people who had perished by
millions to gain our victory. Russians, too, you
starved, so far as you could. Even medical stores
you kept out, so that operations by the knife had
to be performed without chloroform. That is what
your proud service was really doing. Do you
like it? Do you approve it? Is it what you
want to give your life to? Yet, in every future
war, that, more than anything else, will be what
a navy will be doing. I am not reproaching you.
I am asking you the question. It seems to me
that you ought to answer it. And upon your
answer, and that of thousands hke you, will depend
in part the future of mankind. You may, of course
— you probably will— choose not to reply, and not
to consider. But what you cannot choose is, that
your acts shall not produce their consequences.

CAUSE AND CURE 21

I turn next to the airmen. Of you, too, it is
said that you maintain the tradition of chivalry
in war. I daresay you do. You have courage,
as almost all men have. You risk your lives, as
all soldiers do, and also all doctors and all miners.
You bear no malice to your enemy. You drop
wreaths on his grave. Yes, all that, and much
more, no doubt, of which I do not know. But also,
and as your main work, the thing for which you
exist, you drop bombs not only on troops but on
cities. You were perhaps yourself one of those
who dropped them on a circus of little children at
Karlsruhe. That was not your object? Very
likely. But what has that to do with it? It was
your work, and it always wiU be, and always must
be, your work. For you cannot, and will not,
pick and choose where your bombs will fall. As
I read these words. I come across a little controversy
about the action of our Air Force among primitive
people. A Flight -Lieutenant writes correcting a
statement that the population of a certain village
had been destroyed by bombs. The population,
he says (no doubt with truth;, were first removed.
And then he adds : "It is not the custom of the
Royal Air Force to murder women and children, or
even inflict casualties upon natives, unless absolutely
necessary.'' The italics are mine, and the words
italicised contain the gist of the matter. It will
not always be possible to remove the inhabitants,
even though it be desired, any more than the in-

22 WAR: ITS NATURE,

habitants of Amritsar were remdved before General
Dyer shot into them. Our Flight-Lieutenant, I
suspect, would not profess that it was his duty to
refrain from bombing unless the inhabitants had
been removed. Whatever the intention, and what-
ever the feelings of the Royal Air-Force, that
Force is, in fact, a women -and -children -bombing
Force, and cannot help being so.

But, leaving aside this question about " policing,"
what about the next great war? Everyone knows,
and everyone admits, that it will be fought largely
in the air, and that the first objective will be
the capital cities of the enemy countries. Our
Flight -Lieutenant, if he should live to see that
day, will be sent to bomb Berlin, or Paris, or
Petrograd, or New York, according to the direction
which politicians, uncontrolled and unnoticed by
him, may have given to our policy. Or again, he
will be bombing food-ships in order to starve the
whole civil population of the enemy country. Plans
for this performance are being worked out
elaborately in America. I read to-day of " a fast-
cruising isea ship which will carry a super-giant
airship, which will contain a swarm of aeroplanes
which can be rapidly put together in the air and
started on a mission of destruction. Not only
will it be possible to enforce an air blockade at
the other side of the world, if necessary, but by
employing what is to be called this new ' sea-
airplane ' on an extensive scale, it wouUl be

CAUSE AND CURE 23

possible to keep on bombing and harrying, night
as well as day, food-ships bringing vital cargoes
to any country which was the object of this in-
sidious and terrible form of air attrition." And so
on. Now please do not ride off on idle specula-
tions as to whether, as yet, this particular thing is
possible. You know very well that, if it is not, it
will be. You know that there is no limit to the
powers of destruction. The i>oint I want you to
attend to is different. During the late war, all
the flood-gates of rhetoric were opened to con-
demn the German submarine warfare, because it
destroyed merchant ships without warning. Now,
in the country which went to war because of that
" crime," the experts are working out the means
of destroying merchant-ships from the air, without
warning or possibility of defence. Well? What
about all these moral transports? They were mere
talk, expressing anger at an enemy country.
Every country engaged in the next war will do
things much worse than that, and do it with a
clear conscience— if conscience be a word to use
in connexion with war. And you? Are you going
to do that too? You are, of course, if you are told
to. But what do you think of the thing called
war that puts you on that kind of job? Are you
going to wait passively till you are called upon
so to act? Or are you going to join those who
intend to stop war? Which is it to be? The
question has been asked. The responsibility hence-
forth is yours. Which is it to be?

24 WAR: ITS NATURE,

And you next, the artilleryman. Perhaps, by
the next war your occupation may be gone
— I do not know. But, supposing it is not,
what do you think of it? Your shells fall
a mile or two away. You do not see what
happens when they fall. You do not see the
limbs blown to pieces. You do not hear the cries
and groans. You are cheerful when you hit
your mark and depressed when you do not. I
know. I have talked to you, and have found
you a sensitive, humane man. And, you said, you
did not at all mind what you did. No! But was
your not minding a result of your not seeing and,
therefore, not feehng? I do not know. Once
more I ask the question. Have you the right
to evade it ?

And you, the infantrymaji, you on whom fell
the main brunt of the war. As you crouched in
your lousy trenches, as you Went over the top,
as you trampled on the faces of wounded men,
as you tossed bombs into dug-outs, as you bayoneted
men who were stretching hands of surrender, did
you really like doing it? Do you want to return
to doing it? Do you feel that life would be un-
bearably flat if there were no chance of your doing
it? Perhaps you will say, yes. And if you do,
then, of course, you will try to maintain war, and
to oppose those who wish to abolish it. All I am
asking for is candour. And does not one man owe
candour to another, or at least to himself?

CAUSE AND CURE 25

Among those with whom I mainly associate, it
is often assumed that nobody wants war. It is
because I believe that assumption to be untrue that
I am putting these questions. I believe that many
men like war, or think they do, even as war has
now become. Do you want evidence? Take the
following stories from one of the few English
books about the war wliich are both sincere and
well written : Mr. Montague's Disenchantment. Mr.
Montague went through the war and knows what
he is talking about. He is also a trained WTiter,
knowing what words mean. Here are two of his
stories :

" ' I fancy our fellows are not taking many
prisoners this morning,' a Corps Commandant would
say with a complacent grin, on the evening after
a battle." Please observe the " complacent grin."

" A certain General told with enthusiasm an
anecdote of a captured trench in which some of
our men had been killing off German appellants
for quarter. Another German appearing and
putting his hands up, one of our men — so the story
went— called out : ' Ere, there's 'Arry. 'E ain't

26 WAR; ITS NATURE,

'ad one yet.' " The General may have been
" kidded " about the fact, as the author remarks.
But that makes no difference to his state of mind.
He enjoyed the thought of the thing he was de-
scribing. How many more enjoyed it among the
innumerable inarticulate I do not know. But I
hardly dare think they were few.

To soldiers, need I dwell on this point further?
Yes, I believe I must. For they, very likely, are
unwilling to look in the direction in which I am
pointing. Here are some facts given in a letter
to the Nation, signed St. John Ervine. Take
first, an extract from a British military manual
issued by the General Staff. It is headed The
Offensive Spirit, and runs thus : " All ranks must
be taught that their aim and object is to come
to close quarters with the enemy as quickly as
possible so as to be able to use the bayonet. This
must become a second nature." On another page
the manual says : " Bayonet fighting produces lust
for blood," and urges the platoon commander to
increase his own efficiency and thus gain the con-
fidence of his men by " being bloodthirsty and
for ever thinking how to kill the enemy and
helping his men to do so." Where is the
romance, the heroism, the chivalry of war in this
book written by men who know what war is for
the men who are waging it, not for historians,
writers, and enthusiastic women? Let me go
on. This is the kind of conversation that

CAUSE AND CURE 27

really occurred, in the actual experience of this
soldier :

" ' If it was permissible to blow a man's body
to pieces with a " five-nine," why was it repre-
hensible to poison him with mustard -gas? If it
was permissible to kill him when he was un-
wounded, why was it not permissible to kill him
after he was wounded? If he were not killed by
us, we had to employ stretcher-bearers and doctors
and nurses and attendants to take care of him
and thus deprive our own men of a certain amount
of care. Moreover, we had to feed him ! . . .'
Similarly, with prisoners. ' What was the sense
of taking prisoners when they could be more con-
veniently dealt with by getting them all into a
corner and turning a Lewis gun on to them? There
would be less food for our own side if we had to
feed prisoners ! The great capture of Italians
at Caporetto must have depleted the Germans'
commissariat terribly 1 . , .' So ran the argu-
ments of the logicians, reinforced with the in-
disputable argument that many prisoners and
wounded men had been known to kill those who
had spared their lives.

" When one answered these arguments by saying
that ruthlessness provoked ruthlessness, the retort
was ' War is war ! ' When one carried the logical
argument a little further than was customary, and
suggested that since nurses and doctors and Red
Cross officials were engaged in restoring wounded

28 WAR: ITS NATURE,

men to a condition in which they could return to
the fighting line, it would be quite right and proper
to make a particular point of killing them, the
logicians among us held that the argument was
sound. All hospitals ought especially to be
bombarded. The Red Cross should be treated
as a good mark for gunners ! Why should we not
follow the example of the Red Indians, who were
very careful to kill the babies of a defeated tribe
so that they should not grow up and possibly seek
revenge? The logicians said that it might come
to that some day^ little realizing that they spoke
prophetically ! An enemy could be exterminated,
I said, as certain birds and animals had been
exterminated, by sparing the males and killing the
females. There were some extreme logicians who
considered that this was a possible development of
warfare. * Women get very near the front line
now,' they said. ' They'll get into the front line
in the next war ! . . .' One had to be logical.
War was war. The object of the soldier is to
destroy his enemy 1 . . ."'

I don't know, of course, what the enthusiastic
soldier is going to say about this. For myself I
have only to say that this is what war really is,
when all the glamour has been wiped ofi", like the
tinsel it is. And I submit that the only moral is
contained in the words in which my author
concludes his letter :

* See Nation. July 21, 1921.

CAUSE AXD CURE 29

" If war is to persist among men, then the
militarists are in the right, and only those nations
can hope to survive which have made themselves
exceedingly bloodthirsty and have achieved a high
efficiency in killing ; but if civilization in the sense
of cultured institutions is to survive, then we must
somehow eliminate the soldier from society. We
cannot have soldiers and not have wars, for the
soldier with his aspirations is the centre of infec-
tion. What is the use of possessing a highly
organized and skilful army, the efficient militarist
will demand, if it is never tested on the field? And
so, for the gratification of professional pride, we
shall find ourselves involved again in a devastating
conflict. * And so to the end of history,* as
Caesar says in Mr. Shaw's play, ' murder shall
breed murder, always in the name of right and
honour and peace, until the gods are tired of
blood and create a race that can understand.' "

30 WAR: ITS NATURE,

The questions I have put, so far, are to
combatants, who at least have known what war
is ; to whom, therefore, one can only say :
" Well, if you do like it, you do," and leave
them there. But the non-combatants? They
do not know, they do not want to know,
and they have the least chance of knowing,
unless they have a leisure, a detachment, and a
desire for truth which is rare. Part of the
business of war is to prevent those at home from
knowing what this thing is really like which every
agency of publicity is urging them to support. I
remember hearing of a young soldier who, coming
home on leave, went to a cinema that purported to
represent the war. He came out heaving a sigh
of relief. " Thank God," he said, "It isn't
a bit like the real thing. If they saw the
real thing, people might want to make peace."
.We can read now, if we have time and endur-
ance, in books written by soldiers, some true
accounts of what the war was like. But there
was little enough of that published during the war,
and what little there was, was little read. In-
stead, day after day, was stretched, between the
public and the truth, the immense curtain of the

CAUSE AND CURE 81

Press, as irrelevant to what went on behind it,
as is the curtain of any theatre. There were
correspondents at the front who knew, and some
who could feel. Some of these have written since.
But how much could they write at the time?
Those at the front suffered and did things in-
sufferable and undoable. But at least they knew.
Those at home dealt in words and pictures. And
what words! And what pictures! "Tommy"
always cheerful. Nurses always gay. Jokes.
Concerts. Almost, one might think, a perpetual
picnic. The real thing was covered up by the
word " casualties." Of these, so many hundreds,
so many thousands, so many millions. That was
all. Casualties ! For most of them agony or death
to a soldier at the front. For most of them,
long-dra\^'n grief to somebody at home. But
all that was left unrecorded. The Press was
a huge conspiracy of omission ; and, especially,
omission of any good thing that was done
by the enemy. Says Mr. Montague — who ought
to know — " A war correspondent who men-
tioned some chivalrous act that a German had
done to an Englishman during an action, received
a rebuking wire from his employer — ' Don't want
to hear about any good Germans.' " What a
flash suddenly into the pit ! Germans, all Germans,
every individual German officer, soldier, civilian,
ceased, in the Press-mirror, to be human ; while
every Englishman, Frenchman, Italian, American,

32 WAR: ITS NATURE,

became a hero. Here is another example taken
at random, for volumes could be filled with this
sordid story. Here is the actual growth' of one of
these Press legends :

Kolnische Zeitung.

" Wlien the fall of Antwerp got known the church bells
were rung (meaning in Germany)."
The Matin.

" According to the Kolnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp
were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress
was taken."
The Times.

" According to what the Matin has heard from Cologne,
the Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when
Antwerp was taken have been driven away from their places."
The Carrier e delta Sera, of Milan.

" According to what The Times has heard from Cologne
via Paris the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to
ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been
sentenced to hard labour."
The Matin,

" According to information to The Carrier e delta Sera from
Cologne via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric con-
querors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priesta
for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging
thjm as living clappers to the bells \vith their heads down." '

Here is another example, which, at any rate,
is humorous^ :

(Extract from the Italian (Extract from the sam©

newspaper, Popolo d'ltalia. paper, written after Ruma-

Editor, Signor MusoUni. Writ- nia's Declaration of War.)

ten before Rumania's De- " The Rumanians have now

claration of War). proved in the most striking

» Cited by Mr. Ponsonby in the U.D.C. for September 191 7.

' Labour Leader, October 19, 1916. As the dates are not
given, I have not been able to verify these extracts, but I
see no reason to doubt their correctness. And even if not
correct they would be hien trouvis.

CAUSE AND CURE

maainer that they axe worthy
sons of the ancient Romans,
from whom they, hke our-
selves, are descended. They
are thus our nearest brethren,
who now, with that courage
and determination, which are
their special quahties, are
taking part in the fight of
the Latin and Slav races
against the German race — in
other words, in the battle
for freedom, civiUsation, and
right against Prussian ty-
ranny, domineering, barbar-
ism, and self-seeking. Just
as in 1877 the Rumanians
showed what they could
achieve by the side of our
brave Russian AUies against
Turkish barbarism so will
they now also with the same
Alhes, in the face of Austro-
Hungarian barbarism and un-
ci viHsation, throw their sharp
sword into the scales and
weigh them down. Nothing
else indeed could be expected
from a people which has the
honour of belonging to that
Latin race which once ruled
the world."

This is the kind of stuff that was served out to
the people at home, and the people at home hked
it, swallowed it, digested it. Horrible as the war
was at the front, behind the front it was Base.
And the rays of that baseness were caught up
and concentrated, by the glass of the Press, into
that fire of hell that still burns in men's minds.

" People must at last cease
from describing the Ruma-
nians as our sister nation.
They are not Romans at all,
however much they adorn
themselves with this noble
appellation. They are an
intermixture between the bar-
barous Aborigines, who were
subjugated by the Romans,
and Slavs, Chazars, Avars,
Tartars, Mongols, Huns, and
Turks, and so one can easily
imagine what a gang of
rascals has sprung from such
an origin. The Rumanian is
to-day still a barbEirian, and
an individual of very in-
ferior worth who, amid the
universal ridicule of the
French, apes the Parisian.
He is glad enough to fish in
muddy waters where none
of those perils exist which he
seeks to avoid as much as
possible, as he has already
shown in 1913."

84 WAR: ITS NATURE,

It would be as idle to complain of this as it
would be foolish to be surprised at it. Force and
fraud are two sides of one medal, and where the,
one is, there will the other be. The Press is thie
obverse of the gun — the one kills the body, the
other the soul. I dwell on the point for a moment
only that I may make plain how hard it is to
deal with war. For the truth of it is covfered up
in lies. And the boys now crowding from'
school into our Universities know so little about
what was going on, but four years ago, that they
are only sorry they could not take part in it,
and hopeful of better luck next time. If it has
always been hard for men to learn by experience,
it is harder ten-fold now, when experience is
deliberately camouflaged. Thus, on every hoarding
one passes the picture of smiling men, well fed,
well dressed, bent, it would seem, on cricket,
football and love. " This," say the authorities,
-" is what war is. Come and join the army." And
their notices, I suspect, mean more to youfig" men
of nineteen than all the five years of real war,.

I do not know how the lie is to be met, except
by the truth. But the lie is organised, and the
truth is not. And to expect the truth to be
organised is to expect too much. For the lie is.
friendly, sociable, comfortable, and easy, but the
truth is ungrateful and austere. That is why
journalism prefers the lie ; and journalists, what-
V ever their private preferences, can but and do

CAUSE AND CURE 35

but submit. The teaching of mankind now is
done not by any Church ; it is done by a small
set of newspaper proprietors who have no object
except to make money. But it is easier to make
money by lies than by the truth. Truth has only
one power : it can kindle souls. But, after all,
a soul b a greater force than a cro^^x^. These
words are ^\Titten to you, the indi\-idual reader.
If they strike a light in you, that light will shine,
and shining', perhaps, may yet help to save
mankind.

86 WAR: ITS NATURE,

And now, a word to the men of science, and
especially to the chemists. Did it ever strike you
that it is your discoveries and your w^rk that
has made it possible for war to destroy mankind?
I do not say that as a reason against your
science. But may it not be a fact relevant to
your attitude to war, and therefore to politics?
For instance, the other day the British Gov-
ernment asked for chemists to investigate the
uses and preparation of poison gas. They had
no difficulty, so far as I know, in getting
them ; and I remember only one protest from
a Professor of Chemistry. Those of you who
approve of this vrark, what exactly is your
attitude? Do you say : " We have nothing
to do with the uses to which our science
is put. We are the tools. Politicians are the
workmen "? If so, is that an attitude worthy of
science? Or do you add : " We are patriots.
We owe our services to our Government "? That
might be a sufficient answer. But then, something
else follows. Governments, and the conduct of
Governments, depend upon the electorate, and the

CAUSE AND CURE 87

electorate depends, in the last resort, upon its
leaders. Men of science are commonly also
politicians, in some sense. Weil, are you en-
lightened politicians or not? Have you, as citizens,
if not as chemists, considered the problem of war?
And on which side have you ranged yourselves?
I have no wish to be offensive to anyone. The
business is far too serious for that. But hitherto
I have found no evidence that men of science are
better politicians than other men. By " better,"
I mean, both better informed and better minded.
Specialism is a dangerous thing, when sp)ecialists
have power but not insight. But insight means a
knowledge and a discipline about human society,
which is something quite different from knowledge
and discipline about some department of nature.
I saw, during the war, utterances of scientific men
which made me rub my eyes ; so passionate were
they, so ignorant and so confident, on matters lying
altogether outside the speciality of the writer. It
was as though these men were not aware that
society too is a matter for study, and, above all,
for disinterested study. But if a Professor takes
his politics from The Times or the Morning Post,
and if that Professor has in his head (as he may
have) an idea that can annihilate a nation, what
man can be more dangerous than he? I wxjuld
like to know — I don't know, of course— how many
chemists ever think about the relation of their
science to human life and human death. If they

88 WAR: ITS NATURE,

thought hard enough, their thought, perhaps, would
result in a different kind of action. I can imagine,
for instance, that this sort of thing might occur :
that the chemists and the physicists, and whatever
other group of men of science might be concerned,
might get together from all countries and announce
to all Governments that they, for their part, did
not propose to communicate to Governments any-
thing which would be useful in war ; that they
refused their services for such purposes ; and that,
if war was to continue to be waged, it must be
waged without their help. Would not such a
demonstration be likely to have a great effect upon
opinion? You will say it is chimerical. .Well,
but if so, why? Is it chimerical because it could
not be done? Or because it is undesirable that
it should be done? And if undesirable, why so?
Because you are patriots? And patriots in that
ordinary sense, in which patriotism works straight
for the destruction of mankind? And so works
because, although it may be dismterested, it
neither knows nor thinks? If so, I dare to say
that you, of all men, have no right to be patriotic,
in that sense. You have too much power in your
hands. But if you ^vere to know, all of you, and
think, about the problem of war, then what I have
suggested might cease to be chimerical, and
become mere common -sense. At any rate, the
point I am making is so clear that it should hardly
be necessary to make it. It is no longer safe for

CAUSE AND CURE 39

science to put itself, as a mere blind tool, into
the hands of such Governments as in fact we get,
and such soldiers as we must always have, so
long as there are soldiers at all. There is a fight
to the death now going on, not between nation
and nation, but between those whose policy must
destroy, and those whose policy might save man-
kind. Of that conflict, science is the very centre.
It is the instrument both of salvation and of de-
struction. Is it going to remain a mere instru-
ment, passive and indiff"erent to the issue? Or is
it coming out with all its weight, all its prestige,
all its intelligence, on the side of those who mean
to end war?

40 WAR: ITS NATURE,

VII

Among those who mean to end war should
be, one would suppose, first and above all,
the students of human society. But are they?
During the war a distinguished historian sent
me a pamphlet in which he argued that war
was not only inevitable but desirable. So far
from being at the end of it, we were at the be-
ginning. Wo rid -wars on a colossal scale were
just being ushered in. And the attempt to stop
that happening was not only foolish, it was
wicked. For upon war depended all the virtues
of men. In all this there was no argument which
could satisfy a child who had any sense of science.
The alleged necessity was the weakest of in-
ductions from our imperfect knowledge of the
past. The alleged virtues were not demonstrated.
The effect of war on the physical character of
the population was not even touched upon. Every-
thing necessary to a serious handling of the issue
was omitted. Instead of science, we were given
an apocalyptic vision of an appalling future, and
invited to say that it was very good. And this
was only one specimen of the kind of stuff too
often turned out by historians.

CAUSE AND CURE 41

But, of recent years, the tendency has been not
so much to melodramatic generalisation, as to what
purports to be a bare record of facts. That at
any rate, if honestly done, would not do harm,
and if it came into the hands of men of political
or moral genius might perhaps do good. But,
in fact, it is very hard for most historians to do it
honestly, so subtle, unconscious, and all-pervading
is the patriotic bias. Those w^ho only read the
historians of one country may be unaware of this.
But turn from a British to a French or a German
account of the same series of events, especially
in recent history, and you will become aware of
it with a shock. History, in any sense in which
it can help us, is the history of mankind. But
British, French, or German history, written from
the British, French, or German standpoint, is often
all the more misleading in so far as it pretends
(and it may pretend honestly) to impartiality.
What we want is the history of Man, written from
the standpoint of Man. Perhaps, by degrees, we
shall get it. Mr. Wells has made, recently, a
gallant beginning. But we shall not get that kind
of history until we regard that point of view as
right and desirable. And when we do that, we
shall have done much to get rid of war. Mean-
time, war-men must be, and are, the enemies of
true and the friends of false history.

But if it is so hard for historians, even in normal
times, to escape the patriotic bias, in war time it

42 WAR: ITS NATURE,

seems to be impossible. For it becomes, then,
a patriotic duty to view the facts that led up to
the war from the point of view of one's own
country. And the historian is either silent, while
the storm lasts, or he joins the cry with the rest.
The history written, during the war, about the
origins of the war, was, for the most part, 'not
less lamentable than the journaUsm. It was, in
fact, journaHsm masquerading as history. Those
wlio had taken a favourable view of German policy
in the past, who had supported her in 1806, or
1 8 14, or 1866, or 1870 suddenly discovered that
her whole history, since Wilhelm II, since Bismarck,
since Frederick the Great, had been (in contra-
distinction to that of all other nations) one long
tissue of force and fraud. Often, the causes
of the war were reduced to the events that
occurred duringi the last month or the last day
before hostilities broke out ; and those events, so
far as they were known, were misinterpreted and
misrepresented. Very likely, a great deal of this
writing was honest, as far as the beliefs of the
writer were concerned. But, scientifically, it was
worse than valueless. It merely added one more
stream to the torrent of lies and hate that swept
away every nation engaged. The patriotic bias
is, no doubt, as prevalent among students of the
physical sciences as among historians. But in their
case it does not vitiate the science itself ; whereas,
in the case of the historians it turns it into mere

CAUSE AND CURE 43

charlatanry. History will always be, of all studies,
the most doubtful and uncertain, for its very data,
for the greater part of its course, are known only
in fragments, and can never be reproduced by
experiment. History, therefore, at the best can
never be a science. But it might at least be a
humane study. Instead of which, in the last seven
years, it has been a howling of denishes.

4,4, WAR: ITS NATURE,

VIII

War, it is often said by its apologists, is not the
greatest of Evils. To me, on the contrary, it
appears to be precisely that, if only because, in
addition to its own Evil, it includes and brings
with it all others. It kills and mutilates millions
by the deliberate action of other millions. That
is its specific Evil. But also it produces famine,
disease, poverty, crime, vice, the degradation of
physical type and of moral standards. Look out
now on Europe. What do you see? In England
are some two millions unemployed, with no near
prospect of their finding employment. They are
living on doles and becoming thereby, with every
month, more and more unfit to live in any other
way. Those employed are struggling, desperately
and in vain, to maintain a decent standard of
wages and life. And these are the men who were
promised, in case of victory, a " land fit for
heroes." Victory came, through their eff"orts, and
they are ruined by its consequences. Taxes are
crushing as never before in the memory of living
men, and there is little enough prospect of
alleviation. This is the position of one of the

CAUSE AND CURE 45

victors, and the most fortunate in Europe. Of
the rest, France is bankrupt, Italy not much better,
Poland perishing of disease, and the newly
" liberated " countries distracted between covert
civil and hardly covert foreign war. Of the van-
quished, Austria is on the verge of collapse, and
its capital city, once a great <^ntre of civilisa-
tion, is sinking in slow agony towards extinction.
Turkey is massacring Christians on an even larger
scale than before the war. Hungary is in the hands
of a Camorra of reactionary militarists, governing
by coups dUtais, murder, and torture. Germany
struggles under the burden of an admittedly im-
possible indemnity, always on the verge of a
collapse into chaos and Bolshevism. Of Russia
it is hard to say whether she is to count
as vanquished or victorious. But in either case
her people are perishing, by millions, of famine.
Meantime, the victorious states, having won the
war -which was to end war, remain armed on a
greater scale even than before that war, when their
excuse for arming was the military power of the
nation they have now reduced to impotence and
servitude. At a time when every resource of every
nation is needed merely to carry on life, they are
expending on armaments more than they ever
expended in peace time before, and arranging
already behind the scenes, the new groupings,
which are to result in the new catastrophe. If
there are greater Evils than these, I should be

46 WAR: ITS NATURE,

glad to know what they are. And these Evils
are all the result, and solely the result, of war.
If we cannot learn the lesson, there is no lesson
we can learn. But I see no sign that it has
been learnt by the great mass of people, and
especially by those who still direct, unchecked by
public opinion, the foreign relations of states.

CAUSE AND CURE 47

Nevertheless, for my purpose I must assume
that the lesson has been learnt by those readers
who propose to follow me further. And I shall now
take up their next serious argument. " War," they
may say, " is, we agree, a bad thing ; perhaps
it is, as you affirm, the worst thing. But it is
inevitable." Why so? This notion of inevitability
is probably based upon a knowledge that the course
of history has always been accompanied by war.
But that is a lazy way pi looking at the matter.
It would be necessary, if we were studying history,
to go further, and examine the specific causes of
wars at different periods, I have myself made
some preliminary attempt to do this, in a previous
book.' But here and now I am concerned with
the present state of the world. And I ask : Why
is war now inevitable?

Perhaps the reader — if he be the kind of reader
I have in mind — will say something like this :

" There are a number of states, all armed and
all expecting war, sooner or later. Among these
states there is usually a wicked state, the one

' Causes of International War (George Allen and Unwin,
Ltd.).

48 WAR: ITS NATURE,

which intends to fight England. The war thus
prompted will come, one day or another. We
English, of course, shall not provoke it, but the
other fellow will. So we must be ready. Then
whizz-bang 1 He starts. There's a war. We
Man, since we are English. We impose our terms.
There is a lull. And then the same business
begins again. The wicked Power, a himdred year's
ago, was France. Then it Was Russia. Then it
was Germany. Who it will be next, we don't
know. Perhaps France again."

That is really the way many people think about
war. But they ought to make an addition, which,
in fact, they never do make. It is this : It is
not only the English who feel in this w'ay. Every
other nation is feeling in the same way. In every
war, everybody agrees, somebody is the aggressor
and somebody on the defence. But also, in every
war, and for every nation, the aggressor is one's
enemy, and the defender oneself. As soon as that
is grasped, the absurdity of the whole position
flashes into view. You say, the foreigner is the
aggressor. He, with equal conviction, says you
are. The truth does not enter into the question.
The people concerned do not know the truth, are
not in a position to know it, and do not want
to know it. For, as soon as war is in the offing,
the notion that one's own country may be to blame
is repugnant and intolerable to every patriot. Are
we to say, then, that war is inevitable because

CAUSE AND CURE 49

people inevitably misunderstand one another? That
is rather thin ground whereon to proceed to the
destruction of mankind.

And really, do you think it likely that, in the
long history of Europe, it should so happen that
the English alone have always been right and
just in their wars, and their enemies always wrong?
Do you really believe that we have never been
influenced by anything but the desire to do right?
If that were so, why has the British Empire con-
tinually increased as a result of our wars, while
there is no perceptible increase in the prevalence
of Right? It would be a very good corrective,
for anyone who really believes this nonsense, to
read his history for once in a foreign author.
He would get a curious view of British policy
and morals. I do not say it would necessarily
be truer than our own. But it would not be
falser. Such a reader would find that, to foreigners,
the British are the aggressive nation above all
others. He would find them pointing, among other
things, to the British Empire, and asking how
we got India, Canada, Egypt, a great part of
Africa? How we got, and how, for centuries, we
held, Ireland? If he would look further at the
history of British wars, he would find that we
have almost never made a peace without taking
someone's territory. If our wars were solely de-
fensive, why did we do that? It is impossible to
understand the causes of war until we put

50 WAR: ITS NATURE,

ourselves outside this English standpoint. But as
soon as we do that, as soon as we look
at history as men, not as Englishmen, the truth
stares us in the face. It then becomes plain that
all states, in all their wars, have always had a
double object : on the one hand, to keep what
they have got; on the other, to take more.
This, and this only, is the cause of all wars,
other than civil wars. For this double reason,
of defence-offence, states have armed. But as
soon as they are armed, and in proportion as
the armaments are formidable, those armaments
themselves become an additional and independent
cause of war. For they increase the fears which,
in the end, precipitate war, even though they may
also, for a time, postpone it. For whenever one
state makes itself stronger, another state feels
menaced. That state increases its forces, and then
the first does the same. As the armaments increase,
/^ so does the suspicion, the secrecy, the plotting.
The possibilities of peaceable adjustment are
poisoned at the source ; and war becomes really
" inevitable," precisely because everyone is fear-
ing it and preparing for it. This truth is illustrated
by the history of all states for centuries, but, to
a degree unknown before, during the years pre-
ceding the late war. It became so palpable at
that time, it emerged with such lucidity, that one
might have thought that the old fallacy : " If
you want peace, prepare for w*ar," would have been

CAUSE AND CURE 51

finally discredited. Obviously, however, it has not
been. Our generals, admirals, politicians still
shout it to a bamboozled world with apparent
conviction. Yet there are signs of progress. The
opposite view is also to be heard from leading
men. For example, as I write, I come across
the following remarks of Mr. Lloyd George, who
has, at any rate, more sense of facts than most
statesmen, whatever may be thought of his way
of dealing with them. Speaking the other day
of that massing of troops on the frontiers of states
which marks the end of the war to end war, he
remarked : " It is the fears of nations that make
conflicts. Russia may be afraid of an attack from
Roumania or Poland, and Roumania may be afraid
of an attack from Russia. These fears make
conflicts, when troops begin to mass and double
and increase and march towards each other."
The other view — that the security for peace consists
in the accumulation of armaments — could never be
true until one state' had succeeded in disarming
all the rest. Then there might, indeed, be peace.
But long before that could happen, mankind would
have been destroyed.

The real cause of war, then, in the modem
world, and whenever, in history, there have existed
independent states armed against one another, is,
first, the desire of all states to hold what
they have and to take what belongs to others ;
next, the armaments produced by that situation,

52 WAR: ITS NATURE,

which armaments then become themselves a further
cause of war. Given that position, and you may
say, without exaggeration, that war is inevit-
able. There remains only the manoeuvring
for position. In earlier times, when there was
no pretence of democracy, and the feelings of
peoples could be ignored, this manoeuvring was
directed mainly by considerations of force ; and
you get, for example, the spring of Frederick of
Prussia upon Silesia. But during the nineteenth
century, when political conditions have made it
necessary to elicit a more active support on tlie
part of peoples, it has become important for states
to appear in the position of the attacked, rather
than of the attacker. They can then pose as
injured innocents. In the late war, it was we
and our Allies who were successful in this en-
deavour. The Austrians and Germans really did,
in the last month, precipitate the war. And that
fact was sufficient to bring out, on the side of
their opponents, the sentiment of patriotism in its
full strength. On the other hand, the fact that
the enemy Governments did, in this sense, provoke
the war, was not enough to prevent their peoples
from waging it for four years and a half. Still,
the fact that the immediate blame fell upon the
Austrian and German Governments was no doubt
a real asset to the enemies allied against them,
and in particular induced many states (especially
those of America), that might otherwise have re-

CAUSE AND CURE 58

mained neutral, to come in on the side of the
ultimate victors. It would, however, be childish
—and even historians begin to admit it — to go
on thinking that the war was caused simply and
solely by this action of Germans and Austrians
at the last moment. It was caused by the whole
situation of the European states for years past.
And unless a real and successful attempt had been
made to alter radically both the purposes of Govern-
ments and their means of achieving them, the
war would have been ultimately precipitated in
some other way, even if the crisis of 19 14 had
been overcome.

54 WAR: ITS NATURE,

I PROPOSE, immediately, to describe the larger
and deeper causes that really produced the Great
War. But before doing so I will make a brief
digression. For there is another view about the
causes of war, with which we are confronted, some-
times by friends of war and sometimes by its
enemies. Both alike are impatient of careful
analysis of the way in which wars do actually
come about. Both prefer to attribute them to
some profound property of human nature, rather
than to shallow policies of the human mind. And
the inference drawn is, that it is idle to consider
. the poHtical causes of war, for war will happen
simply because men are bellicose.

What truth is there in this?

It will be easier for me to deal with the question
if I tmay suppose that one of these ordinary, simple,
unreflecting men is reading me. I would then
ask him : During the years of peace, are you really
fretting, all the time, because you haven't the chance
of killing somebody, and of dying yourself? Be-
cause you are not showing your courage in this
particular way? Because there are passions and

CAUSE AND CURE 55

instincts in you urging you not merely to fight
(perhaps you do fight, and have fought, this or
that man at home), but to make war ; that is, to
be part of a huge machine the object of which
is mass-killing?

I hardly think that the question would even
be understood by most ordinary Englishmen. I
hardly think many Frenchmen even would under-
stand it. Some few men, no doubt, mistrained in
literature and philosophy, might understand, and
might even say "Yes." But you, the man I sup-
pose myself to be talking with, however restless,
however dissatisfied, however ambitious, however
self-sacrificing, wiR you say that, during the years
of peace, you were longing for war? That it
was your desire for war that caused the explosion
of war? Or even, that your sense of the inevita-
bility of war made you hasten its coming, as a
man may throw himself before an express train?
No. That, I believe, you will agree, is a false ''-
account of the facts. Men may be restless and
dissatisfied, but they do not say : " Now, let's
have a war to get rid of this feeling."

On the other hand, if it were not for certain
things in the ordinary man, of course war could
not be provoked. Men are passionate, unreflective,
capable of anger, of excitement, of illusion. So
that, when certain appeals are made, they may
be counted on to respond. They do not care
about the purposes which move those who control

56 WAR: ITS NATURE,

policy. Simply, if they are told " The country is
in danger," " We have been insulted," " Someone
is trying to take away something we ought to
have," " Someone has attacked us," a charge goes
off in them and there is an explosion. In that
charge are included all sorts of passions ; some
not ignoble, such as " Now I shall see whether
or no I am a coward " ; and some ignoble, such
as " Now I shall be free to give way to my lusts."
It is this magazine of passion coming down
to us from animal ancestors, and embellished and
decorated by proverbs, phrases, stories, religion,
hterature, philosophy — it is this that goes off when
it is touched.

Yes. But who touches it? For it does not
go off of itself. Nor does it, of itself, ache for
that peculiar satisfaction that only war can give it.
Generations have lived without war, and felt no
loss. And also generations have had war, and
felt no gain. The leap of relief with which passions
and desires, thwarted and tense, jump at war,
is but a first movement before war begins. As
soon as men are in it, they are in a machine.
And then begins the weariness, the disillusionment,
the animality, the bestiahty, until, cynical and worn
out, the survivors survive only to continue a
mechanical activity till " victory " is achieved or
lost. And then? A burst of relief, followed
by years of toil, frustration, self-indulgence, or
despair.

CAUSE AND CURE «7

Is that, or is it not, a true account of what
happens to you, the ordinary man, in war? Once
more I can but ask. But you ought to consider
and answer. For upon the answer to such ques-
tions depends the fate of mankind.

But if I am right, if I am right even in part
only, or right essentially though not in detail,
then my argument remains right too. Wars are\
caused, not by these passions of ordinary men, ',
but by the playing upon them by particular men. \
And this playing upon the passions is the cause
of wars, as much as the spark is the cause of the
explosion. The process is this : A mass of men,
passionate, and whose passions find imperfect vent in
the ordinary occupations of civil life : armed forces,
waiting to be used : statesmen and journalists with
policies : policies involving war : then the drop
of the spark, the crisis, the declaration of war,
and, simultaneously, the leap of these passions of
men into the new vent opened to them. And then,
it lies so near to say : " The passions made the
war." But they did not. They were only a '
necessary condition of the war being made. And
they might go on existing, for years and centuries,
without war, if the other, the real causes, were not
brought into existence. What are those causes?
In general terms, I have already described them.
I will proceed now to indicate them, in more
detail, for the case of the late w^t.

58 WAR: ITS NATURE,

With a view to clearness, we will divide the
issues into those of the West and those of the
East. In the West there were two main facts
y making for war. The first was the friction between
France and Germany, due to the seizure by Ger-
many of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870. The population
of Alsace was wholly German, in origin and speech,
and that of Lorraine largely so ; and both' provinces
had been stolen by the French, in the past, from
the German Empire. Their seizure by Germany
might therefore plausibly be said to be a " re-
covery," not an " annexation," and was so regarded
at the time by Germans and by a great pa,rt
of the British. But the very fact of the friction
produced between France and Germany for all
those forty years, is proof that it was none the less
bad policy. The question of Alsace -Lonaine lay
like a shadow across the map of Europe. It was
a chronic source of the poisoning of international
relations.

Meantime, Germany, after a financial crisis due
to the taking of indemnities from France— a crisis,
of course, not comparable to that from which

CAUSE AND CURE 59

Europe has been suffering since the peace, but
due to the same cause, the attempt to make the
enemy pay for the war — Germany, nowi united,
proceeded to develop by her industry, intelligience
and resources, immense manufacturing and trad-
ing power. She became the principal rival
of Great Britain. Her merchant Sihips, her
agents and her travellers spread over the world,
until, about 1900, she said: "I must have
a navy." Her reason for this is only too
clear, and too good, in the anarchy in which
the nations hitherto have lived. If she had
no navy, she had nothing to defend her trade
in case of war with England or France. And
when might not war come? So the Germans, not
imnaturally, reasoned, as we should certainly have
reasoned in their place. The response from Eng-
land was equally natural. We tried, fir'st, between
1899 and 1902, to make an alUance with Germany.
The principal advocate of this policy was Mr.
Chamberlain, but Lord Lansdo\\Tie also approved,
and so did other leading British statesmen. If
these negotiations had succeeded, we should, no
doubt, have had a war, because the whole policy
of all nations presupposes war. But it would
have been war against Russia and P'rance, and
on the side of Germany. It was, indeed, precisely
the expectation that that would be so, that seems
to have made the Germans cold towards our offers.
Up to that date, our principal friction had been

60 WAR: ITS NATURE,

with France, commonly regarded, and with much'
reason, as our hereditary enemy. We were nearly
at war with her on several occasions, most notably
over the Soudan in 1898. But now, failing to
come to terms with Germany, we turned to France.
This was one of the great revolutions in European
diplomacy ; revolutions which, however, always
leave everything the same, so far as the lives of
the peoples are concerned ; for they are merely
changes in the grouping of Powers, not in the
nature of diplomatic relations.

Our agreement with France turned mainly on
the two questions of Egypt and Morocco. Egypt
is an old story on which we need not dwell. We
took it, partly to secure the money of our bond-
holders, partly to control the route to India ; and
France had been quarrelling with us ever since,
because she had not accepted our invitation to go
in and take it with us. Morocco, though an old
question, is one less familiar. For a long time
France had been wanting to take it, and for a
long time we had stood in her way. Then came
our attempt to ally ourselves with Germany, and
it was proposed by leading ministers that we should
divide Morocco with her ; she to have (curiously
enough) that port, among others on the Atlantic,
about which, ten years later, we nearly made war
on her because we thought she Wanted to take
it. When we made the entente with France we
gave her Morocco, in exchange for her leaving

CAUSE AND CURE 61

us alone in Egypt. But the treaty by which we
gave it her was secret. She w^s to wait her
opportunity, and we were not to interfere. The
Moroccans, naturally, were not consulted in the
matter. They were only " natives," who would
one day be useful as conscript soldiers for France,
but otherwise deserved no consideration. This
agreement with France is interesting as showing,
first, that states can settle their disputes without
war; but, secondly, that they seldom do so in
fact, except when the motive is to act in common
against some other state. In this case, the state
that England and France were to act against was
Germany. And no sooner had we made our
Entente with France than we had our first
quarrel with the new enemy. It was over this
very question of Morocco. Germany's ofi"ence
was that she desired to keep the trade of that
country open to all others (as, by a public treaty
dating thirty years back, it was supposed to be).
There followed an international Conference, at
which the French and the British agreed with
the other Powers to maintain the independence
and sovereignty of Morocco, while they kept in
their pockets their secret treaties dividing it
between France and Spain. For a time, after
this, France aimed at a joint Franco-German
economic exploitation of the country. This, how-
ever, was but a temporary device. Finally, in
1 9 1 1 , she made her military expedition. There

62 WAR: ITS NATURE,

followed an explosion from Germany, and France
and England came within an ace of War with that
country. .We could not, we said, tolerate that she
should seize that port on the Atlantic, which we
had offered her ten years before. We were all
righteous indignation. Germany gave way, taking
what is called " compensation " elsewhere. And
the crisis, for the moment, passed, leaving the
usual ill feeling behind it.

Meantime, the first Moroccan crisis had raised
the whole question of military co-operation between
England and France. Mr. Haldane, thereupon,
with great energy, skill and success, organised an
Expeditionary Force to go, in case of need, to
France. At a later date, naval co-operation was
also arranged, our fleet^ leaving the Mediterranean
to be guarded by the French", on the understanding
that when the war came, we Would protect the
coasts of France. Thus the Entente had really
passed into something not easy to distinguish from
an alliance. Sir Edward Grey could, indeed, say
with truth in 1914 that, technically. Parliament
was free to decide whether we would go to wan
or not. But in fact, as he said, and as we thought,
we were bound " in honour " to support France.
These military and naval arrangements had been
made without consultation with", and without the
knowledge of, the House of Commons, or even
of the majority of the Cabinet. We knew of the
Entente and approved it. But we did not know

CAUSE AND CURE 68

of the military and naval engagements, nor yet
of the secret treaty about Morocco.

The Entente with France was made by Lord
Lansdowne. It was followed, in 1907, by the
Entente with Russia, arranged by Sir Edward Grey.
Once more it was shown that the long friction
between tw'o states could be peaceably adjusted ;
but, once more, only if the new friendships in-
volved a new enemy. Sir Edward Grey, it is
true, did not desire hostility to Germany ; he said
—and no doubt said truly — that it had always been
his desire to bring her into friendly relations with
the other Powers. But there is no evidence that,
at any time, this was either the intention or the
desire of the French or the Russian Government.
On the contrary, passage after passage in the
despatches shows that that was precisely what they
were afraid of. France, or, rather, certain influential
people in France, wanted something she could only
get by war, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. She
might not make war for that, but, with that in
view, she would contemplate, not without satis-
faction, the possibility of war, if it could be shown
to have been provoked by Germany, and if there
were a sufficient chance of victory. The position
of Russia was rather more complicated. There
was an intimate relation between the Tsar and
the Kaiser, in which the latter dominated the
former. And nothing is more curious than to see
these two third-rate men, one little more than an

64 WAR: ITS NATURE,

imbecile, the othei hardly sane, dealing, in private
meetings, letters, -.nd telegrams, with the pros-
perity of nations and the life blood of millions
of men. That kind of thing we may, perhaps,
hope has gone once for all out of Europe, and
that is perhaps the only good thing the war has
produced.

Partly owing to this personal relation of the
Kaiser and the Tsar, the policy of Russia is some-
what obscure to follow. As a rule, she worked
with the Entente, but there wtere relapses towards
Germany which distressed and disturbed Sir Edward
Grey. Broadly, however, it may be said that
Russian policy was directed against Germany, and
directed, definitely and consciously, towards a war.
There were, in fact, two objects which Russia
could not achieve, or thought she could not, in
any other way. One was the control of the
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, the straits whicli
give her an outlet from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean, and which, of course, were then
held by Turkey, The control of these straits was
an old object of Russian policy although, from
time to time, for various reasons, she paused in
the active pursuit of it. We ourselves fought
one war in the Crimea to thwart that ambition,
and nearly fought another in 1877 for the same
reason. But the Entente had altered our policy.
We were now more afraid of Germany than of
Russia ; and it would appear that Sir Edward

CAUSE AND CURE 65

Grey had given assurances to the Russians that
they could have the straits at any suitable moment.
The French also, no doubt, would have assented,
though reluctantly. Presumably, however, Germany
— though once Bismarck had said that the question
of the straits was not worth the bones of a single
Pomeranian grenadier — would now have opposed
Russia. For Germany was building the Bagdad
railway, and looking forward to a great extension
of commercial influence in Turkey. At any rate,
Russia thought she could not get the straits with-
out war. We know this definitely, because there
has now been published an account of a meeting
of the Russian Crown Council in the February
of 1 914, six months before the Great War, in
which a European war was said to be imminent,
and arrangements were made for the military steps
to be taken by Russia in order that she might
secure the straits. So much for the innocent nations
of the Entente, seeking nothing by war, and
surprised in their peaceable avocations by a pre-
datory Germany !

The second object of Russian policy' was
supremacy in the Balkan Peninsula. The long
horrors, the intricate perplexities, the intrigues and
counter-intrigues, the popular passions and the
diplomatic manoeuvres, that for so long have made
that little piece of ground the plague spot of
Europe, we cannot now pause to describe. It
will be enough to attend to certain main facts.

66 WAR: ITS NATURE,

The Balkan States, those bellicose hordes of primi-
tive and violent men, had won, b'y war and
diplomacy, their independence of Turkey. But
there remained in 1 9 1 2 the province of Macedonia
still misgoverned by Turkey, though inhabited for
the most part by people whom the Bulgarians said
to be Bulgarians, the Serbs to be Serbs, and the
Greeks to be Greeks. Macedonia was " liberated "
by the Balkan wars of 191 2-1 3, but no sooner
had the Turks been expelled than the Christian
allies fell to quarrelling about the spoils. As a
result, the greater part of the province was divided
between Serbia and Greece, though it would seem
that the bulk of the population is really Bulgar.
Meantime, Russia and Austria -Hungary had both,
for years past, been watching the situation, in-
triguing and co-operating with, or antagonising,
one another, in order to secure their interests, or
what they supposed to be such, in the Peninsula.
This is a very long and complicated story, and
of interest only to those whose painful task it
has been to study the worst passions of men de-
* voted to the fooHshest ends. Both' states wanted
to dominate the Balkan Peninsula, because both'
wanted to own or control ports on the Adriatic
or the ^gean Sea. At the time of which we
are speaking, Serbia was the friend of Russia.
She had largely increased her territory, as the
result of the Balkan wars. And there were, in
the Austrian Empire, large numbers of Serbs whom

CAUSE AND CURE 67

the Serbian State desired to unite with herself,
destroying, by the process, the x^ustro-Hungarian
Empire. The sympathies and pwlicy of Russia were
all on the side of the Serbs, partly because the
view had been propagated, among influential and
patriotic Russians, that the Serbs were their
" little brothers " — very much as many English-
men regard Ulstermen as their little, or big,
brothers ; partly because the Serbs might be ex-
pected to be favourable to Russian ambitions in
the Balkans, if only because they were hostile to
those of Austria. During the Balkan wars, the
great Powers had managed to keep out of the
war, though only by hook or by crook. But it
is worth noting that, just before the peace
that ended the Balkan wars, Austria approached
Italy to ask her whether she would join her
in making war on Serbia. Italy, backed
by Germany, refused, and Austria kept quiet.
Meantime it was clear that there were these two
questions which Russia intended to settle in her
own interest : the question of the straits and that
of the Balkans ; and that she did not believe
they could be so settled except by war.

And Germany? The awkwardness and bluster
of German diplomacy, the siUy, violent talk of
her newspapers and reviews, the cult of war as
a great and noble thing, the talk about " shining
armour," and all the rest of the paraphernalia of
romance, was disgusting and disquieting to other

68 WAR: ITS NATURE,

states. Germany was certainly a disturbing element
in Europe. But, so far as I am laware, no evidence
has yet been published which implicates her in
any attempt or design to break the peace prior
to 19 14 — implicates her, I mean, in any special
way, apart from that rivalry of all states which
is the real cause of war. Crisis after crisis arose,
during the ten years preceding the Great War,
and in every one of them Germany seems to have
tried, as much as any other state, to keep the
peace. You can, of course, say — as became the
fashion when the Gr^at War broke out — that she
had been preparing not only war, but the war,
for ten years, forty years, a hundred and fifty
years ! There is nothing men and historians will
not say, and even think, when their passions are
excited. But the fact is that all that talk is sheer
nonsense. In Bismarck's time, between 1875 and
1890, Germany was the principal bulwark of peace
in Europe. And if she became, later, a disturbing
element, it was not because she was planning war,
more than other states ; it was because she now
had a policy which, like that of other states, must
entail the risk of war. She wanted an extension
of her commercial and political power in the East ;
and that brought her into conflict with England
and Russia. She wanted colonial expansion ; and
that made her seem dangerous to France and to
ourselves. These objects, in the anarchy of
European policy, constituted a danger of war.

CAUSE AND CURE 69

But they did not, of themselves, make it "in-
evitable." For, in fact, by 1914 England and
Gennany had come to an agreement about the
questions most dangerously dividing them. By
that year one must conceive the nations full of
mutual suspicion, piling up armaments which made
that suspicion continually more deadly, but not,
at that moment, any of them, determined on war ;
partly because they were afraid of it ; partly be-
cause they were all reluctant to make war unless
they felt sure of victory, and unless the enemy
could clearly be put in the position of the aggressor.
Nevertheless, the war was there, waiting. The
powder was collected ; the httle boys were creep-
ing about, in the dark, with hghted matches. It
was just a question who would first drop one. And
the boy who did drop it was the little primitive,
barbarous, aggressive state of Serbia.

On June 28, 19 14, the Crown Prince, the heir
to the Austrian throne, was assassinated at Serajevo
in Bosnia. If we wish to understand the effect
of this act, we may take an analogy. Suppose
that, some time in 1920, the Prince of Wales
had been murdered by Sinn Feiners in Ireland.
Suppose, further (for that is necessary to make
the parallel complete), that Ireland were not
separated from England by St. George's Channel,
but were joined to us by a land frontier. Suppose
further that the Atlantic were cancelled, and that
millions of Irish just over the border, in America,

70 WAR: ITS NATURE,

were plotting, along with our own Sinn Feiners,
to destroy the British Empire. How should we
have felt in that case? How should we have
dealt with proposals to submit the dispute to the
Hague Court? Can you not imagine the fury
of the British press? Can you not hear the dogs
and wolves howling? Well, it was much the same
in Austria. The Government, supported and egged
on by public opinion, determined to punish Serbia,
and make her powerless for the future. In this
they were supported, through thick and thin, by
Germany, and especially by the Kaiser. That
romantic and hysterical man was horrified at the
murder of a crowned head, and especially of the
heir to the old Emperor, for whom he felt attach-
ment and reverence. But there were also political
reasons of a more serious kind. In view of the
balance of power (that fetish of all statesmen
and all historians), and in view also of her con-
nexions with Turkey and the East, it was necessary
for Germany to maintain the Austrian Empire,
and to prevent the route eastward from being"
cut by Balkan states under Russian domination.
Germany therefore said to Austria : " Get rid of
the Serbian menace once for all. We will support
you if there is trouble with Russia." For they
had bluffed Russia in 1908, and they hoped to
bluff her again. That was the situation. Rapidity
and secrecy were essential. The ultimatum to
Serbia was to be presented before the other Powers

CAUSE AND CURE 71

knew what it was ; it was to be of a kind which'
it would be impossible for Serbia to accept ; and
it was to be followed immediately by war. On
July 23rd, a month after the Serajevo murder,
the ultimatum was presented.

vWhat followed has been the subject of more
elaborate analysis, more passionate accusations,
more tendencious and dishonest exposition, than
any series of events in history. But the main facts
are now clear. Russia did not, apparently, desire
war at that moment, but was determined to fight
if Austria proceeded to crush Serbia. As far as
any moral question is here concerned, in the
superficial sense in which men think of morals,
it turns upon the right of Russia to adopt this
attitude. The Austrians and Germans said, and
say, that the question was one solely between
Austria and Serbia ; much as, in the parallel I
suggested above, we should have said that the
question was one solely between England and
Ireland ; or as we did say, at the time of the
Boer War, that it was one solely between England
and the Boers, rejecting any proposal of mediation.
Russia, on the other hand, regarded it as a
Russian question. .Why? For reasons of power.
She w^anted to dominate the Balkans and to prevent
Austria Hungary from doing so. But this power-
motive, as we have seen, was reinforced by the
belated and uncertain doctrine of racial kinship
with the Serbs. The exact question, so long as

72 WAR: ITS NATURE.

we keep the discussion on those lines, is whether
there is a better justification for one empire to
maintain itself against disruption, than for another
empire to extend and consolidate its power at
the cost of the first. On this question, once it is
clearly put, an eternal and unprofitable controversy
might be waged. But, in fact, so long as power-
policies are the motive of all states. Right and
Wrong in international affairs has no meaning.
It is a mere extra -weight, thrown in by those
responsible, to justify positions adopted for other
reasons. I leave the matter at that, insisting^ only,
, once more, that that is the core of the whole
question, for those who still suppose it to be
important to think on such lines at all. Statesmen
themselves, and soldiers, and sailors, and all who
really determine policy, do not in fact so think.
They consider, at every crisis, whether it is or is
not worth while to have a war, for the sake of
power or territory or markets ; and they then paint
the moral camouflage, so that the situation may
look well for their country.

Meantime, to • return to our summaiy account,
France, it was well known, would fight on the side
of Russia if there were war about the Balkans.
That had been made clear in the previous crisis.
France, no doubt, was not strictly bound so to act.
She could have said that, in such an issue, the
casus belli contemplated by her treaty with Russia
did not arise, and then, no doubt, Russia would
pot have fought. But in that case Austria and

CAUSE AND CURE 73

Germany would have gained an access of strength,
and France wanted precisely the contrary. The
Balkan issue, therefore, was to be the signal for
the conflict between France and Germany, if that
issue came to war. And this Russia knew. Under
such circumstances the attitude of England might
be decisive. Sir Edward Grey wanted peace and
worked for it. All the attempts made by Germans
to show him as plotting for war have broken down.
His case was better and more tragic than that.
Caught up in the European anarchy he could see
no better course than to bind himself closer and
closer to France and Russia, with a view to
thwarting what seemed the greater peril of
Germany. If there were war between France and
Germany, he was bound -" in honour " to support
France, unless France, in some obvious way,
" provoked " war, which, under the circumstances,
and with her intelligent statesmen, she was not
likely to do. Still, though thus entangled with
the enemies of Germany, Grey might have hopes
of mediating successfully, as he had done, with
Germany's support, in 191 2-1 3, during the last
Balkan crisis. He certainly now made every effort
to do so. And equally certainly these efforts were
thwarted, at first, by Germany as well as by Austria.
For those states meant to have war, the Serbian
war at any rate, and, if Russia and France should
intervene, also the war with those countries.

That was the position at first. But then, as the
crisis became acute, Germany wavered. She found

74 WAR: ITS NATURE,

that she could not rely on the support either of Italy
or of Roumania, and that she might have England
against her. She reversed her policy and began
urging Austria to concessions which might obviate
war. But Austria procrastinated till it was too
late. For already, as early as July 29th, Russia
had mobilised on all fronts, while falsely saying
she had not.' On discovering this fact, Germany,
on July 31st, rephed by her ultimatum to
Russia and to France. And the war, so long-
played with and so long postponed, was at last
precipitated.

Belgium, of course, did not come into the
causation of the war at all. The attack on her
was a consequence, not a cause. But it made a
great difference to England. For though' we were,
at any rate, bound, as most people think, to enter
the war, and though, in fact, Grey had made it
clear that we should fight, whether or no Belgium'
were invaded, yet there would have been more
hesitation in England, and more division of opinion,
but for that act of Germany. From that point
of view the invasion may be said to have been a
godsend to our Government. And it certainly in-
fluenced the attitude of a great number of brave
and honest young men, who went into the war
as ithough it were a crusade. What it really was,
we have seen, and we see now, daily and hourly.

» This seems to be probable. But it is possible that the general
mobilisation (as distinguished from that against Austria) was not
ordered before the 30th. The point is not of great importance to
our purpose.

CAUSE AND CURE 75

XII

In the last section I have given a general account
of the diplomacy which led up to the war. It will
be clear from that sketch how far from the
truth is the popular idea, for which hundreds of
thousands perished, that Britain and her Allies were
fighting a crusade for Right, and had themselves
no material objects to pursue, similar to those
which were sought by the Germans. But this
demonstration, based though it be on evidence that
cannot be disputed, does not convey the fuU
cynicism of the statesmen of Europe. That can
only be arrived at by records of their talk ; and
those unfortunately are not easily available. It
happens, however, that one book has been pub-
lished which gives detailed accounts of conversa-
tions with some of the actors in the great drama.
It deals with the attempt made by the Austrian-
Emperor Karl, in the year 191 7, to make peace
through the medium of Prince Sixte of Bourbon,
and records, in notes taken at the time, the con-
versations held. From this book it seems worth
while to take a few examples.'

' Austria's Peace Offer, by Prince Sixle of Bourbon. Ed. by
Manteyer.

76 WAR: ITS NATURE,

We will begin with the question of the left
bank of the Rhine. It may be remembered that
a treaty had been made in 191 7, between France
and Russia (kept secret from the other Allies)
whereby this district, inhabited solely by Germans,
was to be separated from' the German Empire and
put under the control of France. The separation
was to be called " neutrality " ; but one can
imagine the kind of neutrality the French would
have been likely to permit. This matter is referred
to in a conversation between Prince Sixte and the
French President, M. Poincar^.

" The Prince said that he himself went even
further than the President and held that we ought
to neutralise all the left bank of the Rhine. The
President smiled as he answered that one could
not always say everything that one felt, but that
his views and the Prince's were practically the
same." * ■'

iWe see from this little episode that the French
of 191 7 were exactly like the Germans of 1870,
only worse. For the sake of their own security
they meant to detach from Germany some milHons
of Germans and put them under French hegemony.
The results of course would have been the same
as those of the GermJan annexation of Alsace-
Lorraine — a continual friction ending, on a favour-
able opportunity, in war.

We will pass on now to another point equally

« Austria's Peace Offer, by Prince Sixte of Bourbon, p. 99.

CAUSE AND CURE 77

significant. The negotiations to which we are
referring, for peace with Austria in 191 7, broke
down because of the opposition of Italy. The con-
duct of that state for years past had been a master-
piece of what one of her statesmen has fondly
called " sacred egoism." Italy was a member of
the Triple Alliance. But also, for many years,
she had been in close touch with the opposite com-
bination, and had so arranged her treaties that on
the one hand she could claim assistance from her
allies if attacked herself, and even call upon them
to support her in an aggressive war against
France ; but on the other could refuse assistance
to them in case of war between Germany and
France. Thus situated, Italy announced, from the
beginning, that she regarded the Austrians and
Germans as the aggressors and therefore did not
hold herself bound to assist them. At the samie
time, she made it plain that her neutraUty was to
be had for a consideration. The consideration, of
course, was territory belonging to Austria, but
inhabited by Italians. There followed a long duel
between the members of the two aUiances for the
favour of Italy. Finally, the Entente were held
to have made the best offer, and Italy came over
to their side against her own allies. She was to
be paid out of Austrian territory ; and thus arose
the difficulty of making the separate peace with
Austria. Italy had to be squared, and it was not
possible to square her, for Austria would not offer

78 WAR: ITS NATURE,

what she -vvanted. Her claims do not appear to
have been popular with her new allies, and the
references to her, cited in the conversations of
French statesmen, are singularly rude. One might
almost suppose that the two nations were not bound
together in a wholly disinterested crusade for
Right. " Italy's ambition,'" said M. Paul Cambon,
.French Ambassador in London, " inspires her to
all kinds of mischief." » Ambition, and in a state"
fighting for Right ! Can we haVe heard correctly?
Yes, it is indeed so ! For in a second interview
the same statesman remarked that Italy " had
announced again and again that she had come into
the war solely to conquer the territories she
coveted." 2 The recalcitrancy of Italy annoyed
that lover of the French, Prince Sixte. " Could;
we not," he asked, " put pressure on her by
refusing her coal and shipping? " " No," says
M. Cambon sadly, "for that would be tantamount
to a declaration of war. "3 Finally, when the war is
over—the war for Right against Wrongs — Italy, in
the opinion of M. Jules Cambon, late French
Ambassador in Berlin, will immediately join hands
with the representatives of Wrong I " There can
be no doubt that in forty-eight hours after peace
is signed Italy will be in the arms of Germany." 4
M. Cambon's brother agrees. " Italy will do nothing
for us. She has only one idea, to perfect her

» Austria's Peace Offer, by Prince Sixte of Bourbon, p. 103.
» Ibid, p, 173. J Ibid. p. 174. 4 Ibid, p. 28.

CAUSE AND CURE 79

preparations for joining in the economic struggle
after the war when all the other allies are
exhausted."' All this was a libel on Italy? Per-
haps, and perhaps not. What is Italy? The young
men who were dying in their thousands? Of that
Italy, who can speak? But the Italy referred to
means the statesmen who brought that other Italy
into the war. And the France referring to it
means the French statesmen, not the French
combatants. We are dealing here with the pullers
of the strings, not with the dolls pulled, and we
are seeing how the puUers of one ally really looked
to those of the other.

Let us turn now, still in the same connexion,,
to Constantinople. Many people who took
seriously the alleged objects of the war thought
that one thing it might do was to settle, in a sense
favourable to peace, the question of Constantinople
and the Straits. Whether the assignment of the
prize to Russia would have been a satisfactory
solution msly be doubted. But that solution was
adopted in the Secret Treaty of 1 9 1 5 . Then came
the Russian revolution, and Russia became, first
suspect, then an enemy, to the fighters for Right.
For she had a; Government which threatened what
was, to these propertied men, more important even
than Right, the basis of property. The French
drew a long breath. They had never wanted the
Russians in Constantinople. They preferred a

Austria's Peac* Offer, by Prinr* SixU of Bourbon, p. 173.

80 WAR: ITS NATURE,

weak Turkey there, as more favourable to Frencli
ambition. " Certain people," said M. Jules
Cambon, " make ideal allocations of territory to
all the nations : Constantinople lo Russia, for
instance ; there we were much too precipitate.
That was a great mistake. . . . Then the entire
Adriatic to Italy. As for ourselves," he adds sadly,
" we shall be left as cold as charity." But then a
gleam of comfort enters. " There are territories
for us too in the Turkish domains." ' Territories?
But we thought we were fighting for Right I Did
you? Deluded men ! Those of you who have
survived know better now.

To return to our theme. Italy being unwilling
to forgo her claim on Austrian territory, an
attempt was made to square Austria by offering her
territory in Germany. The French negotiators
suggested Silesia and Bavaria, out of the German
spoils ; they planned, that is, the complete dis-
memberment of Germany, by way of reprisals for
the seizure by Germany in 1870 of two French
provinces, inhabited almost entirely by Germans.
The Austrians replied that, apparently, Silesia and
Bavaria were not as yet French to give. That
matter, accordingly, was dropped, and booty in
Africa was substituted. " The Prince then
suggested that one of the Italian colonies might
meet his (the Emperor Karl's) requirements.
Tripoli was barred as a too recent acquisition which

» Austria's Peace Offet, by Prince Sixte of Bourbon, p. 28.

CAUSE AND CURE 81

would yield nothing, and was too close to Italy.
There remained Erythraea and Somaliland. The
latter in particular had a future before it, and was
quite unknown to the great majority of the Italians ;
he could say confidently that they would not resent
its cession ; while, from the Austrian point of view,
the novel experience of an African dominion could
only be pleasant, especially when it was taken in
exchange for a crowd of blustering and uncon-
trollable irredentists. A negro was, in short, better
value than an irredentist." ' Better value !
Observe. The negro is a piece of goods to the
fighters for Right. You transfer him as you
transfer a bale of cotton. It will be " pleasant "
to own him. The Germans also wanted to o\sti
some negroes. " Oh, the Germans ! But that
meant the domination of the world ! But that
meant exploitation. But that — by God, that was
wrong ! Come, young men, enhst, enlist ; fight
the war for Right ! " And you came. And you
fought. And millions of you died. And tens of
miUions were wounded and crippled. And now
you starve.

And Right? And the end of the war? Well,
as to that, your shepherds, in their private
talk, were less optimistic than yourselves. Let
us listen to another conversation : " The period
after the war," said Prince Sixte, " would be
terrible." And M. Jules Cambon replied :

» Austria's Peacf Offer, by Prince Sixte of Bourbon, p. 139.
6

82 WAR: ITS NATURE,

" Yes, after the war we shall begin to regret

the war, for we shall find ourselves faced

with difficulties the like of which were never seen

before." » What ! AVas that all? Not, then, a

war to set the world right?, But to produce " worse

difficulties than ever were known before? " British

statesmen agree. " The financial problem was then

discussed. Bonar Law summed up thus to Mr.

Lloyd George : * The money shortage will not stop

the war, but after the war we shall be crippled.

As Prime Minister during the war you have a

very hard time, but the man who will be Prime

Minister after the war will have a pretty bad time

too.' " 2 Mr. Lloyd George assented. But that

was not going to affect his conduct. No indeed !

" None of the belUgerents would be held up by lack

of money." They would perhaps get it out of

the Germans afterwards? How successful they

would be in that, we are seeing and shall yet see.

^ But money, money, what's money? The lack of

money only means unemployment ; only means

poverty ; only means despair ; only means soldiers

walking the streets begging or stealing ; only

means the end of all social improvement ; only

means, at worst, the end of European society.

What does it matter, when Right is at stake?—

Right interpreted as we have seen it interpreted?

Take your gruelHng, and take it quietly I Haven't

you won the war?

» Austria's Peace Offer, by Prince Sixte of Bourbon p. 126.
» Ibid. p. 178.

CAUSE AND CURE 83

XIII

In the previous sections I have indicated, briefly,
but sufficiently for our present purpose, the real
causes of the war. It will have been observed
that power, markets, and territory were, on all
sides, the only motives op>erative in the minds of
the statesmen who were conducting, in the dark,
the policies of Europe. Nevertheless, it is also
true that it was Austrian and German policy that,
in the last month, actually precipitated the war ;
though the Russian mobilisation, undertaken at the
moment it was solemnly denied, was also an
important contributory cause. The reader may
therefore think that, after all, all the Right was
on one side, and all the Wrong on the other.

But if that were so, the fact would have
appeared in the actual war -aims of these fighters
for Right. Self -aggrandisement, territory, markets,
nothing of that kind would have been sought by
them ; for those were the objects of the mcked
enemy. For them, Right, Peace, CiviHsation,
would have been the only motives. They would
have had one object, and one only — to disarm, after
ending once for all by their victory the reign upon

84 WAR: ITS NATURE,

the earth of cupidity and force. Many young men,
I think, died in that hope, and in that hope many
mothers and wives endured their deaths. Let me
cite, once more, an author who was also a com-
batant : *' ' The freedom of Europe,' ' The war to
end war,' ' The overthrow of militarism,* ^ The cause
of civilisation ' — most people believe so little now
in anything or anyone that they would find it hard
to understand the simplicity and intensity of faith
with which these phrases were once taken among
our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds of
thousands of men who are now dead thaf if they
were killed their monument would be a new Europe
not soured or soiled Avith the hates and greeds of
the old. That the old spirit of Prussia might not
infest our world any more ; that they, or, if not
they, their sons, might breathe a new, cleaner air,
they had willingly hung themselves up to rot on
the uncut wire at Loos, or wriggled to death, slow
hour by hour, in the cold filth at Broodseinde."

So writes Mr. Montague. But how does he
continue?

" Now all was done that man could do, and all
was done in vain. The old spirit of Prussia was
blowing anew ; from strange mouths, from several
species of men who passed for English — as
mongrels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs and demi-
wolves are all clept by the name of dogs — there
was rising a chorus of shrill yelps for the outdoing
of all the base folly committed by Prussia when

CAUSE AND CURE 85

drunk with her old conquest of France. Prussia,
beaten out of the field, had won in the souls of
her conquerors' rulers ; they had become her
pupils ; they took her word for it that she, and
not the other England, knew how to use victory." '
The disillusionment began long before the end
of the war, though it was not till the peace treaties
that it became confirmed and universal. Mean-
time, for that disillusionment, a; definite basis was
given, to those who were in a position to follow the
facts, in the secret treaties, between the Powers of
the Entente, published in 1 9 1 7 by the revolutionary-
Government of Russia. These treaties had been
entered into behind the backs of the combatants.
They were " secret," and with reason. For if
they had been public they might have chilled to
the bone that generous ardour which the conspiring
Governments required in their soldiers, that they
might achieve purposes the opposite of those which
soldiers supposed themselves to be fighting to
attain. Let us examine briefly the contents of
these treaties, for, though kno^^'n, they are still
too little attended to, and their significance is not
properly appreciated. What, as interpreted by
these authentic documents, did the Fight for Right
really turn out to mean? Did it mean, for example,
disarmament, and a world henceforth at peace?
Not at all! Of that, not a wiord in the treaties.
No League of Nations. Nothing whatever hinting

* Disenchantment. By C. E. Montague.

86 WAR: ITS NATURE,

even remotely at any change in those motives and
pohcies of statesmen out of which the Great War,
like all other wars, had come. Every clause of
■^ every treaty dealt simply with the transference of
territory from the enemy states to the Allies, that
the former might become weaker, and the latter
stronger.

Thus, first, Alsace-Lorraine was to be restored
to France, without consultation of the inhabitants,
without any procedure which could make this
transference back to France of a German-born and
German-speaking population appear more final or
more rightful than its transference from France to
Germany in 1870. For (as the Fighters for Right
could themselves affirm, when enemy territory was
in question) the only test of the rightfulness of a
Government is the will of the people to submit to
it. I do not say the provinces ought not to have
gone back to France, because I daresay (though
I do not know) that they would have voted to do
so, if they had been consulted. But the taking
of the vote would have put upon the fact the seal
of a new principle, and that seal the French, from
the beginning, refused to give.

This may seem a small point, but it is signifi-
cant. Let us proceed. By a treaty so secret that
it was not communicated even to the English, the
French agreed with the Russian Tsardom (that
singular champion of Right) to separate from
Germany and put under French hegemony all the

CAUSE AND CURE 87

German provinces on the left bank of the Rhine.
Thus the war to avenge the wrong done by
Germany to France in 1871 was to issue in a
similar wrong, done on a much larger scale, by
France to Germany.

British statesmen, their own interest not being
concerned, did not approve this arrangement. And
it was British as well as American opposition
that prevented the French from actually carrying
out their policy in the Treaty of Versailles
and formally separating the Germans west of the
Rhine from Germany. But clearly the French
have never abandoned that aim. They have been
pursuing it, and are still pursuing it, by other
means. Their attitude is perfectly intelligible. It
is in harmony with the principles which for
centuries have inspired the policy of all states, as
they inspired that of Germany in 1870. What it
is not in harmony with is the professions of the
Allied Powers, who marked themselves off from
their enemies as the champions of Right against
Wrong. But those professions were intended for
a different purpose : they were intended to get the
young men to fight. And when their purpose was
fulfilled, they could be discarded.

In addition to these spoils on the left bank of
the Rliine, France was confirmed by the treaties
in her possession of Morocco (an appropriate end
to that long story of filibustering to which we have
already referred), and was given her share of

88 WAR: ITS NATURE,

German colonial territory in Africa, and a part of
the Turkish Empire, now at last, after so many
years of covetous eyeing by the great Powers, to
be partitioned among the representatives of Right.

Not less fortunate was Italy. We have seen
how, in the contest for her favour, the Germans
and Austrians had been outbribed by the Entente
and how she decided that it would pay her
better to fight against her allies than to fight on
their side. The consideration she was to receive
was naturally expressed in terms of territory. She
was to have the Trentino (including the purely
and patriotically German territory in the South
Tyrol), Trieste, and the Adriatic coast and islands ;
and also her share of the Turkish spoils.

Russia (for the revolution had not yet occurred
and she was still — being under the Tsar — regarded
as a friend and an ally in the cause of freedom)
was, first, to do what she liked with Poland ; and
what that would be was pretty well indicated by
past history. Poland would be promised autonomy
while the war was being fought, and crushed at
leisure when it was over. Further, Russia was
to receive, at last, Constantinople and the Straits,
as well as her share of Turkey. " According, to
this agreement," writes, in 1922, a Russian
historian,' " the Ottoman and Austrian Empires
were to be divided as spoils of war, Russia receiv-
ing Constantinople and the Straits." Exactly.

> BaroD S. A. Korff : Russia's Foreign Relations, p. 45.

CAUSE AND CURE 89

" As spoils of war." The Entente, like the Triple
Alliance, had no other purpose or idea.

And England? Oh, England was to have the
bulk of the German colonies, and Mesopotamia.
Little pickings, hardly worth noticing, when one
was fighting for Right 1

These treaties, signed between 1 9 1 5 and 1 9 1 7,
are a sufficient, final, and irrefutable proof of the
real objects of the Powers of the Entente. How
do they differ from the objects of the Germans
and their allies? There is no difference at aU.
Precisely the thing for which the Germans were
held up to the reprobation of the world — their desire
to take other people's territory — ^was the thing, and
the only thing, pursued by Germany's enemies. Do
you reply that the Turkish Empire deserv^ed and
required partition? Perhaps it did. But suppose
it had been Germany and Austria that had parti-
tioned it? Those states, if they had won, would
certainly have controlled it. Would you have been
pleased? And if not, why not? Because they would
have mismanaged it? And are you satisfied, then,
with the management of Greece, of France, of
England, since 191 8? No I Your objections to
German conquests would have been, simply, that
they were conquests by your enemies ; as your
satisfaction with the conquests of the other Powers
is, that they are conquests by yourselves or
your Allies. Nothing else ever entered the minds
of the Governments fighting the war. All the rest

90 WAR: ITS NATURE,

was cant to keep the stream of young men flowing
to mutilation and death. And please observe, that
in these treaties, there is not even the pretence of
the " mandatory " principle to justify the annexa-
tions. That was introduced later, under another
influence, as was everything else in the final treaties
that has any show of a new principle. And that
influence came from across the Atlantic. It was
the influence of President Wilson and of the United
States .

These treaties, then, of the earlier years of the
war, are the authentic proofs of the real objects of
the Powers of the Entente. And they formed
in the end the main part of the final treaties. But
there were two important events that caused certain
modifications. The first was the Russian Revolu-
tion. Of that tremendous event we have not yet
seen the end. The first revolution, apparently, was
favoured by Great Britain and France. It was
hoped it would lead to a more energetic pursuit of
the war by Russia. But it was succeeded, in the
autumn of 1917, by the second or Bolshevist
Revolution. And that was a very difl'erent aff"air.
It was a revolution, first against the property
system of Europe, secondly against the war and
all its works. The Allies of Tsarist Russia were
doubly outraged. For first, and chiefly, their
property in Russia, including their enormous loans.,
was confiscated ; and secondly, their victory, with
all that was to follow it in the way of loot, was

CAUSE AND CURE 91

endangered. From that time on they were occupied
in fomenting civil war in Russia in order to restore
their friends, the well-to-do class, to power.

The first effect, then, of the Bolshevist Revolu-
tion, was shattering. There was indeed (so it
would seem) a moment when the British Prime
Minister was contemplating a general peace, which
would hand over Russia to the tender mercies of
Germany, while securing to France and England
what they wanted in the West. But other counsels
were adopted, under the influence of the second
great fact which had changed the situation. The
United States had come into the war, and an
attitude different from that of any of the Euroj>ean
Governments began now to influence words, if not
deeds. For America, and America alone, was dis-
interested. She was not proposing to get anything i-
out of the war. To her it really was a war for
Right. And that view was represented with a
simple directness by her President. With his help
the war was won, completely and absolutely. The
enemy lay prostrate as a great Power had seldom
before been prostrate in history. The stage, it
seemed, was clear for the bringing into effect of
those great principles for which, professedly, the
war had been fought. President Wilson came to
Europe to secure by his own prestige the results
for which, alone, he and his country had fought.
And never before has the path of a states-
man been followed with such hopes and prayers

92 WAR: ITS NATURE,

of all good men, such fears and intrigues of all
bad ones. The bad men won the day, for, as is
usual, they were cleverer than the good ; and
America retired, defeated by Europe, to her pre-
war isolation.

The peace, then, that was finally made was the
peace of the secret treaties, modified by the defec-
tion of Russia, and camouflaged by that constitu-
tion of the League of Nations which, it is pretty
safe to say, would never have seen the light of day
had it not been given a prominent place, from the
beginning, in the programme of President Wilson.
Its form, indeed, was rather British than American,
for the President's insistence had given power to
those elements in England which really did want
a better world. But had not the President been
there, with his achievement, his honesty, and his
determination. Lord Robert Cecil and his friends,
I think, would never liave had their chance.

But the League of Nations was to be the
smallest part of the peace ; a mere appendage,
leaving untouched all the predatory schemes of the
victorious states. The peace was made on the
lines of the secret treaties, except so far as Russia,
now a pariah, was concerned. Her share of the
spoils she had voluntarily renounced ; and she
had made a separate peace with her enemies.
Neither from her own point of view, nor from that
of her late Allies, had she any further claim. The
division of territory', therefore, could be made with-

CAUSE AND CURE 93

out considering her. And the Turkish Empire
was distributed between the other Allies — that is,
between France, England, Greece and Italy.

There were two other more or less important
modifications of the secret treaties. The French
claim not only to annex Alsace-Lorraine, but to
separate from Germany and put under French
domination the whole left bank of the Rhine, met,
as we have seen, with strong opposition on the part
both of the English and of the Americans. There
was a long battle over this point, in which, on the
French side, the principal champion was General
Foch. Finally a compromise was reached, whereby
the occupation of the left bank was to be for
fifteen years only, by which time, according
to the assumptions of the treaty, Germany would
have paid her reparations and would recover her
sovereignty. It is clear, however, that from the
beginning, the French statesmen were determined
that that situation should not arise, and that, in
fact, Germany should default, so that their occupa-
tion might continue. The following scene is
interesting in this connexion. General Foch,
supported by M. Jules Cambon and M. Tardieu,
had been pressing on the French cabinet his plan
for a permanent occupation by the French of the
left bank of the Rhine, with power to conscript the
German population to fight against their German
compatriots. M. Clemenceau was defending,
against him, the treaty, as it finally passed, whereby

94 WAR: ITS NATURE,

the French have the right of occupation of the left
bank for fifteen years only. After explaining how
he had been compelled, by pressure from President
Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George, to adopt that
position, he turned to M. Poincare, the President,
and said : " Mr. President, you are much younger
than I. In fifteen years the Germans will not have
executed all the clauses of the treaty, and in fifteen
years, if you do me the honour to come to my
tomb, you will be able to say to me, I am con-
vinced of it, ' We are on the Rhine and we shall
stay there.' "

The history of the last few years is one long
and terrible comment on these words. You may
understand the French attitude — it is only too
intelligible' — and, understanding, you may approve.
But no understanding and no approval can alter
facts and consequences. The policy thus adopted
means the perpetuation in Europe of fear, hatred
and rage ; means the new war, when the new
conditions arise to make it possible ; and means
the destruction of civihsation and of mankind.
That these men do not see it, will not see it,
cannot see it, makes no difference to the fact.
M. Clemenceau, as he said, will no doubt be dead
before the fruit of his policy matures. M. Cambon
and General Foch will perhaps be dead. Those
who pay for their error, or their crime, will be a
new generation. In ways not fully imaginable by
us, and yet imaginable enough, they will fall in

CAUSE AND CURE 95

holocausts as a sacrifice to the false ideas of these
old men, and with themselves they wiU drag into
the abyss all the hopes, all the achievements, and
all the promise of mankind. Verily the world
pays high for the rule of the old, of the rich, and
of the men of fixed ideas I

So much then for France in Europe. Outside,
she took Morocco, as already arranged by the
treaties, her share of the German colonies in Africa,
and her share of the Turkish spoils.

Turning now to Italy, she was assigned, as by
treaty, Trieste, the Trentino, and the South Tyrol.
On the Adriatic she was less fortunate. For some
reason President Wilson was stiffer here than in
other matters ; and also the new Jugo-Slav state
had to be considered. After long debates and
long hovering on the verge of war, a compromise
was reached which may or may not be permanent.
But if — as Governments and their policies pre-
suppose— the old anarchy is to continue, then there
is every chance of war between Italy and the new,
ambitious, and inexperienced state that confronts
her on the Adriatic.

In the East, Tsarist Russia having disappeared,
the Allies felt no further hesitation in *' liberating "
Poland ; not so much from any love of the Poles,
as because the French saw in the new state a
means of holding both Germany and Russia in
check. The new Poland cuts off East Prussia
from the rest of the Prussian state, and thus creates

96 WAR: ITS NATURE,

a new feud which, when Germany recovers, will
hardly be settled without war. Germany has also
been deprived of the principal part of the coal
supplies of Silesia, whereby the impossibility of
her payment of reparations has been increased,
and a new source of future wars created.

Austria-Hungary has been disrupted, and the
new states carved out of her Empire, while they
are dominated by Slavs and Czechs, contain large
minorities of Germans and Magyars, who are now
the oppressed instead of the oppressors. Mean-
time, the old Austria is cut off both from the sea
and from the neighbouring countries once included
in her Empire, and the two million inhabitants of
Vienna seem to have little prospect except that of
gradual decay by emigration, famine and disease.

But it is on Bolshevist Russia, even more than
on Germany, that the full rage of the victorious
Powers has been vented. Along her Eastern
borders has been created a row of small and (for
the moment) independent states. Poland claims
another great slice of her territory, inhabited mainly
by Jews and Russians. In the East, Japanese
troops occupy the Siberian coast.' The im-
mense territory of Russia is now almost com-
pletely land-locked. And if ever the old governing
class regains power, it is as certain as anything
can be in history that they will devote themselves
to undoing by a new war for empire the results
of the " war for liberty."

» Now (November 1932) said to be withdrawn.

CAUSE AND CURE 97

But strangest of all the fruits of the war
is the treatment of the Turkish Empire. To
begin with it was partitioned (as by the secret
treaties) between England, France and Italy,
\\-iih a bit added for Greece. For Greece
had been secured, it was thought, after long
flirting with Germany, for the cause of Right.
Meantime, and until further determination, Con-
stantinople and the Straits were to be held jointly
by England, France and Italy. From that time
on there began a subterranean duel between France
and England, which came to a climax in a secret
treaty made by the former with Kemal Pasha,
who was in rebellion against the Government which
both states were nominally supporting at Constanti-
nople. This treaty handed over the Armenians
to the Turks, who, during the war, had murdered
a million of them in cold blood. It also handed
back to Turkey territory which had been entrusted
to France under mandate, and was therefore under
the control of the League of Nations. The British
were taken aback ; strong protests were made ;
and a new treaty agreed to, whereby the Turks
were put back into possession of Constantinople
and the Bosphorus. Europe, it would almost
seem, was unwilling to lose grip of such an
ancient and trusty cause of war. There followed
the final defeat of the Greeks, morally backed
by the British, by the Turks, morally and
materially backed by the French. The Turks are

98 WAR: ITS NATURE,

now to get Eastern Thrace as well as Constanti-
nople. And the fighters for Right once more
endorse the principle th^t he who takes shall have.
In return, the Turks are promising what is called
the " freedom of the straits." And it is char-
acteristic of the ways of Governments that this
ambiguous phrase is not being defined, at any rate
to the peoples concerned. It may mean, as it
appears to mean to Mr. Lloyd George, that the
straits are to be free to all navies. In that case, it
is a war measure, not a peace measure, and one that
gives an obvious naval advantage to the British.
Or it may mean that in time of peace merchant
ships are to be free of the straits. But that they
have been for years past. Or it may mean that
they shall be so free in war as well as in peace ;
which is desirable, but probably very difficult to
secure, when Turkey is at war. Or it may mean
what the Russians are said to be suggesting, that
the straits be free to merchant ships but never to
warships. And that appears to be the only
desirable interpretation and the only one consistent
with a genuine intention to end war. By the time
this book appears the question will be settled one
way or the other. • But how characteristic that,
at the very moment of its being settled, the peoples
of all countries are left so completely in the dark
as to what is intended.

So much for the territorial arrangements

» Now settled in the sense that the straits are to be free to war-
ships ; ••ttled, that it, with a view to having a next war.

CAUSE AND CURE »»

achieved, after complete \-ictory, in a war for the
rights of small nations. All these results, it should
be added, are provisional, so that no one can say
how much of the structure thus elaborately erected
will be left standing ten years hence. Meantime,
on another great question — more important in the
eyes of the victors than all this rearrangement of
Europe — their record was equally remarkable. This
question was what is called " reparations." What
the origin of the war really was, and what kind of
responsibiUty the Germans had for it, we have
already seen. But the official theory of the victors
was, of course, and is, that the whole blame rested
exclusively on the vanquished. They even com-
pelled them to sign a statement to that effect, as
though such signature, extorted by force, could
make any difference to the facts. In any case, it
could make none to the victors' right to reparation,
which was governed by their acceptance, as the
general basis of the peace, of President Wilson's
manifesto of January 8, 191 8 (the fourteen points),
and his later utterances. Only two reserv-es were
made. First, in respect of the " freedom of the
sea," on which the Powers resened their liberty
of action ; next, \\'ith respect to reparations, in
the statement that Germany should repay all the
damage done to the civil population of the allied
nations and to their properties by the aggression
of Germany by sea, land or the air. There was
thus no possibility for the victorious Powers, with-
out breaking their pledged word, to claim the whole

100 WAR: ITS NATURE,

cost of the war. Yet this was precisely the first
thing done by the British delegates at Versailles ;
and they yielded only to a telegram of President
Wilson, during his temporary absence, vetoing
that policy as inconsistent with the terms of
the German surrender." Worsted in this first
bout, the British and the French did not resign
their object. Wild promises had been made at
the elections, promises incompatible with the
pledged word of the Allied Governments,
and these promises must somehow be redeemed.
After a long and sordid wrangle, it was decided
to include the cost of pensions in the damages to
be demanded of Germany. That this was incom-
patible with the plain sense of the declaration on
which the Germans surrendered, I do not think any
honest and well-informed man can dispute. In
any case, the result was disastrous. For it enabled
the victorious Governments to make those impos-
sible claims which have prevented the restoration
of Europe for the last four years, and are driving
us month by month into social disintegration and
ruin.

Do I exaggerate? L'Ct the reader then listen
to the judgment not of a mere writer but of a
public man of the inner counsels, who has there-
fore both the opportunity to know and the rare
courage to say. It is thus that Signor Nitti, the

' See What Really Happened at Paris, ed. by E. M. I louse and
C. Seymour. Chapter on Reparations, by T. W. Lamont.

CAUSE AND CURE 101

Italian statesman, writes of the state of Europe
in June, 1922.

"In an orgy of violence Europe has been tied
to a series of errors which in future years will
seem to be the exaggerations of historians. While
continental Europe suffers impoverishment and
Balkanisation, the victorious states, after disarming
the vanquished, are maintaining armies, which, in
number and efficiency, exceed those of the peoples
which were regarded as the provokers of the war
and the artificers of militarism. The attempt to
execute treaties impossible of execution necessitates
armies of occupation which are not only a moral
absurdity but have cost Germany over sixteen
hundred millions of gold marks, or considerably-
more than her pre-war army and na\'\'. France
and Italy are not paying their debts to the United
States ; they are not in a position to pay either
capital or interest. On the other hand, the Entente
is not only claiming that Germany shall pay for
the army of occupation and for the whole of the
expenditure arising out of control — a sum which
is amounting to an enormous figure — but is demand-
ing as reparations huge indemnities and enormous
payments in kind ! "

There is the judgment of a realistic statesman
on the results of four years of the war for Right
and four years of the pea.ce which it secured. But
perhaps you are not interested in the views of
statesmen and economists. Very well ; listen then

102 WAR: ITS NATURE,

to an American man of business, certainly not a
pro -German.

" One does not need to be pro -anything to see
that these treaties were conceived in hatred and
malice. In the minds of their makers they had
a background of an awful irreparable injury they
had suffered. The enemy, terribly powerful in his
late strength, barbarous in some of his methods of
warfare, potentially capable of future reprisals, was
for the time being under the heel of the conquerors.
It is perhaps not surprising that hatred, retaliation,
burning resentment and unfairness were written
into them. When treaties are so made, however,
they are not a healing document. Outside of the
provision for the League of Nations, there is
nothing in the various treaties of Paris that is
healing. It is very difficult to see, however, ihow
a continent afflicted with them can recover, until
they are rewritten ; for that they will be rewritten
is inevitable. They have set up political situations
as unstable as quicksilver. They have drawn
national boundary lines that may be erased like
pencil marks. They have created economic situa-
tions which must be altered, or whole peoples must
economically perish." »

This is an American, a banker. You don't
trust him? Very well. Take, then, an EngHshman ;
take a General ; take a man innocent of business,

» Frank A. Vanderlip : What Next in Europe ? p. 66 (George
Allen and Unwin, Ltd.).

CAUSE AND CURE 108

of economics, of everything except chivalry and
romance ; take one of the men who helped you
to win the war. What does Sir Ian Hamilton say
of the treaty?

" Fatal Versailles ! Not a line — ^not one line— in
your treaty to show that those boys (our friends
who are dead) had been any better than the
Emperor's ; not a line to stand for the kindliness
of England ; not one word to bring back some
memory of the generosity of her sons."

No ! Not a line— not one line— in the treaty,
nor in any treaty of peace ever framed. For the
General, even now, has not fathomed the full
tragedy of war. No war ever fought has ever
been ended by anything but a base peace. For
war is about base thmgs. It matters little what
feelings may have possessed the fighting men. It
is not those feelings that determine either the cause
or the issue of war. War is about territory, power -^-
and trade, and about nothing else. And the peace
of Versailles is but one more proof of that fact. Sir
Ian Hamilton is not likely ever to learn this truth.
He has devoted to war all his chivalry, all his
enthusiasm, all his life. But no devotion of the
worshipper alters the character of the god. And
war remains, what it has always been, murder
for the sake of loot ; only now, murder on a scale
and with a precision that threatens the very
existence of the murderers.

104 WAR: ITS NATURE,

XIV

That the peace, then, should have been what the
peace is, follows from the nature of war, for which,
while it continues to be a possibility, peace can
be nothing but a preparation. It is interesting
to find that, in this matter, as in so many others,
our own Prime Minister saw clearly what the facts
were. He knew what the peace ought not to
be, but he was powerless to make it what it ought
to be. For he could not destroy, in a few weeks,
the passions which he himself, as a War Minister,
had been inflaming for five years. The memo-
randum he presented to his colleagues at Versailles
in the spring of 1 9 1 9 is worth attending to,
for it contains some of the truths this book is
endeavouring to enforce, stated by the best of
authorities — by the man who has been, in his own
person, an instrument of the Evils which followed
from neglecting them.

The memorandum begins with a sentence of
mere rhetoric, worth citing, however, as a curiosity :
" To achieve redress our terms may be severe,
they may be stern and ruthless, but at the same
time they can be so just that the country on which

CAUSE AND CURE 105

they are imposed will feel in its heart that it has
no right to complain." This is mere nonsense.
No country would ever believe that a victorious
foe thinks about justice, nor, iti fact, does such a
foe ever so think ; for justice wTOuld always
penalise the victor as much as his enemy. But
a victorious foe might conceivably think about
security and peace ; and this Mr. Lloyd George,
having got rid of the cant which he may have
thought necessary, does more or less propose. He
objects, for instance, to putting under the dominion
of Poles and Czechs and Jug'o-Slavs " large masses
of Germans clamouring for reunion with their
native land." He objects to a similar treatment
of Magyars. He sees clearly that that procedure
will lead to new wars in East Europe.

Further, he sees the spirit of revolution
abroad in every country. " The whole exist-
ing order in its political, social and economic
aspects is questioned by the masses of the
population from one end of Europe to the
other." He sees the possibility of an invasion of
Europe by the Russian Red Army — " the only army
eager to fight because it is the only army that
believes that it has any cause to fight for." What
a piece of candour is that ! And how any
" pacifist " or " bolshevist " would be belaboured
if he had ventured to say the same thing I This
possibility of an invasion by the Red Army is not
made less possible by the fact that the only

106 WAR: ITS NATURE,

alternative may be death by starvation— a star-
vation which the Western Governments, in their
desire to destroy Bolshevism, have deliberately and
in cold blood refused to alleviate. History, in
spite of all its irrationality, has its Nemesis, and
we may witness it here.

Mr. Lloyd George proceeds : " The greatest
danger that I see in the present situation is that
Germany may throw in her lot with Bolshevism,
and place her resources, her brains, her vast
organising power, at the disposal of the revolu-
tionary fanatics whose dream it is to conquer the
world for Bolshevism by force of arms." Three
years have passed since those words were written.
The Allied Governments have been doing all they
could, ever since, to destroy the whole fabric of
civilisation and order in Germany. They have
not quite succeeded yet. But every day brings
the consummation nearer. Already, at Genoa,
Germany and Russia have signed an economic
treaty. Press them a little harder and they may
sign a military one. But if they do, not they, but
the policy of the victorious Powers, will be to
blame.

Finally, Mr. Lloyd George suggests that it will
not be convenient to impose a peace which no
responsible German Government would carry out.
For what could we do in such a case? We might
blockade Germany. But Mr. George professed
doubt whether public opinion '* would allow us

CAUSE AND CURE 107

deliberately to starve Germany." Here he was
perhaps unduly pessimistic. Public opinion in
England, that is, the public opinion that counts —
The Times and the Georgian Press, rich men and
women, and members of Parliament — is quite ready
to starv^e anybody to death, as their attitude to-
wards Russia at this moment shows. It is only
the poor and the unemployed, only the negligible
nine -tenths of the nation, that object ; and they
can be ignored. But then, the memorandum goes
on, even if we did so, the result would only be
" Spartacism from the Urals to the Rhine." Yes.
And that is what we are waiting for. It stands
now at the door.

Seeing then, with a clairvoyance unusual in a
statesman, what the results must be of imposing
a peace of vengeance, Mr. George counsels a
moderate indemnity' ; the smallest possible transfer
of Germans to foreign rule ; and, above all, a
genuine League of Nations preceded by a large
measure of disarmament. " The first condition
of success for the League of Nations is a firm
understanding between the British Empire and the
United States of America and France and Italy
that there will be no competitive building of fleets
or armies between them. Unless this is arrived
at before the covenant is signed, the League of

» This sentence perhaps does Mr. Lloyd George injustice. For
he has since explained that he always intended that Germany should
pay for pensions.

108 WAR: ITS NATURE,

Nations will be a sham and a mockery." Those
words are so true that they might have been
spoken by a pacifist. They were too true for
Mr. George's followers, for the men, that is, who
had been elected, on his invitation, to impose a
peace of hatred and revenge. The memorandum
became known through a newspaper, and instantly
the Prime Minister was bombarded by the famous
telegram from four hundred of the wolves the
election had put into Parliament. There must be
no relenting, no weakness, no tenderness to the
vanquished foe. Germany must be squeezed (in
the famous phrase for which, perhaps. Sir Eric
Geddes may go down to immortality) " till the
pips squeak." This, probably, would have been
enough to recall Mr. George to the paths of in-
sanity, even if there had been nothing else. But
there was something else. There was M.
Clemenceau. It is characteristic of a war that
its popular hero should bear tlije nickname of the
" Tiger." But perhaps the word does not do full
justice to M. Clemenceau 's qualities. He has
indeed the cruelty of the beast of prey. But he
supplements it with a cold-blooded rationality such
as only human beings can achieve. The instincts
of the wild beast, governed by the brain of an able
man, make up a very formidable combination.
M. Clemenceau coldly pointed out, in response to
Mr. Lloyd George, that Germany, having lost
Alsace-Lorraine and other provinces, and being*

CAUSE AND CURE 109

burdened with a huge indemnity, would, in any
case, be thinking of nothing but revenge ; that
therefore the only thing to do was to make
her revenge powerless ; and that therefore Mr.
George's plea for a reasonable f>eace must lapse.
Mr. George succumbed. Mr. Wilson (in Mr.
Keynes' phrase), was " bamboozled," and once
bamboozled could not be " debamboozled," even
when Mr. Lloyd George wanted to do it. And
we got the " peace " we have got— the subterranean
fire smouldering till it is ready to break out into
the final conflagration.

110 WAR: ITS NATURE,

If you have followed me so far, you will, I think,
be prepared to agree with the following statements :

1 . The Great War, like all international wars,
had for its objects, on both sides, increase of pow^er
and seizure of territory.

2. These objects became clear at the Peace
Treaty. And they were not in the least affected
by what soldiers or civilians may have thought
they were fighting for. For what states aim at
is to be discovered not by what individuals say or
think, but by what Governments do.

3. These objects could not have been pursued
by war, unless the states had been armed. But
the fact that they were armed became itself an
independent cause of war, owing to the mutual
fear and suspicion thus engendered.

4. If states continue to pursue the same objects
by the same means, it is possible that the human
race may cease to exist, and pretty certain that
civilisation will be destroyed.

Now, if we were dealing with the affairs of
any private person, and if it could be shown to him
that a certain course of action must lead inevitably

CAUSE AND CURE 111

to material ruin and physical destruction, probably
he would be induced to alter his course. But there
is not so much reason to suppose that, after such
a demonstration, nations will alter theirs. For
no single person feels responsible for the fate of
states, and no one cares about it in the way that
everyone cares about his own. The intelligent
and the unintelligent alike, the men of good will
or of bad will, are equally concerned with private
ends. They cast, at most, an occasional glance at
public affairs, make their gesture of indifference,
approval, or disgust, and hopefully, or hopelessly,
leave events to take their course. One man is
doing business, another manual labour, another
philosophy, another art, and all alike go sweeping
on, in a kind of blind fatalism, down the stream
that is hurr>ing them to destruction.

Meantime, rulers blunder along, largely in the
dark, following traditional purposes to the
accustomed goal and excusing themselves, when
catastrophes occur, with the reflection that they
could not have acted otherwise, because " public
opinion " expected of them the line of action which
^in fact they have adopted. Governments do not
lead and nations do not follow. There is a
general slithering into the pit, into which, never-
theless, everybody would say they do not wish
to fall.

I do not know, I confess, whether, or how,
these conditions can be altered'^ I am not too

112 WAR: ITS NATURE,

hopeful of the kind of demonstration given in this
book, because I know how people will listen to
an argument, admit it, shrug their shoulders, and
resume their avocations as before. I am not too
hopeful. But since I have chosen to be an observer
and a student, I feel some obligation to point out
what might be done to avert destruction by nations
that should be intelligent and responsible. In this
matter I have indeed nothing new to say, for much
more has been thought out than people are
prepared to do. The achievement would be, if it
were possible, to put behind obvious policies some
real conviction and driving power.

The machinery required to save mankind is that
of a League of Nations, including all states, and
having real power to determine all issues between
its members. But what is not commonly under-
stood, even among supporters of such a League,
is that the League cannot function unless the states
alter their policy. I should be much surprised
if there are not many who think, as I have heard
a distinguished politician say, that for the British
a principal object of the League is to facilitate the
maintenance, and even the extension, of the British
Empire. That, of course, is absurd. A league
of nations means nothing of the kind. A league
of nations means the substitution of settlement by
agreement for settlement by force, and this can
only happen if states consciously and deliberately
abandon what hitherto has been the sole motive

CAUSE AND CURE 118

of their policy, the extension or the maintenance
of their territory and their power.

Now, as we have seen in our brief survey of
the treaties that ended the war, and as becomes
every day more and more evident, states in fact
have not abandoned the old view and adopted
the new one. They are struggling, all of them,
still in the old Nessus shirt of aggrandisement.
Starting, as they did, with the main idea of
bleeding Nvhite the defeated countries, they have
not even been able to agree upon that. The
British, with the comparative sanity that comes
from an intelligent pursuit of self-interest, desire
to fix reparations at a reasonable figure and to set
Germany on her feet again as an economic factor.
The French desire to keep her feeble economic-
ally as well as pohtically. The French, again,
desire to reconstitute Turkey — the murderer of a
million Armenians — into a state under her own
control, in order that she may exploit the Near
East at her leisure. And in this they have
succeeded. The British desire at once to
maintain the Turk, in order to propitiate the
Mahommetan population of the Empire, to weaken
him, in order to propitiate those elements of
British opinion which object to the murder of
Christians, and to exploit the oil of the Middle
East. The Greeks, supported by the British, have
been fighting in Turkey to appropriate Turkish
territory. And by virtue of this division among

114 WAR: ITS NATURE,

the Powers who stood for Right, the Power that,
more consistently than all others has stood for
Wrong, has gained in prestige and authority, has
retained Constantinople, and is likely to complete
the Imassacre of its Christian populations, while
the Christian Powers — who a year or two ago had
the situation in their own hands— look on and idly
protest. In Russia, the Governments of the
victorious states stand by with cold hostility while
millions of people perish of famine. They will
do nothing until the Russian Government recognises
debts which everybody knows that in fact they
can never pay ; while the Powers bent on extorting
from them this admission know also, and know
that everyone knows, that they cannot and will
not pay their own debts. In the Far East, Japan
maintains her illegitimate occupation of Russian
territory,' and fosters, for her own ends, Chinese
anarchy. Throughout the length and breadth of
the world there is no sign that the crusaders for
Right have any intention of adopting for the future
any other course of conduct than that which landed
them in the Great War.

To see all this, and to state it, is unfortunately
easy enough. Nor is it difficult, in general terms,
to point to the remedy. But when one asks why
the remedy is not adopted, one is met by a harder
problem. Is it simply the wickedness or stupidity
of Governments? Probably not. Probably Govern-

» Now, November 1922, abandoned.

CAUSE AND CURE 115

ments are more intelligent and better than
Parliaments. For seldom^ I suppose, have col-
lections of men so ignorant, short-sighted, hard-
hearted and bad-willed been got together as those
composing the present' Parliaments of England and
France. They are the ripe fruit of five years of
war and war propaganda, and there they sit,
unrepentant, perpetuating all the follies and all
the crimes of that carniv^al of Evil. But then,
granting that Governments are tied by their
Parliaments, what ties these? Or, if you like,
what gives them their evil freedom? The con-
stituencies? We shall know that better after an
electic«i. The constituencies may have changed
their minds since the time when they fiUed with
these men the assemblies that rule their countr}-^,
and thereby let loose upon the \\'orld the e\'ilsi
from which it is perishing. Anyhow, it is the
constituencies that do, by omission or commission,
determine policy, and thereby the fate of that
civilisation which they are rather letting run down
than actively pushing into the pit.

It is to the electors, therefore, that is to ordinary
men and women, that I have addressed these
pages ; and to those of them who may read me
1 wish to point out that, although foreign affairs
are only part of the problem we have to meet, they
are, for the time being, the principal part. For
the evils from which we are suffering are the result
» Written before the election of 1922 in England.

116 WAR : ITS NATURE,

of our war policy and our peace policy. It will
be a long time before any real reforms at home
can be undertaken, though no doubt revolution
may be precipitated. Some would wish to do this ;
and I do not propose now to argue that point.
For most people it will be enough to look at Russia.
For the evil that has fallen upon her would be
as nothing to that which must overwhelm an in-
dustrial state like England, dependent for its bare
existence on foreign trade. Revolution is possible,
and may be brought upon us by the kind of
policies Governments are pursuing ; but it could
only be a form of suicide.

Any movement, not revolutionary, that proposes
to do good, must start with the condition of Europe
and of the world. And what it must aim at is
clear enough to all thinking men, though not, for
that reason, easy to achieve. The German indem-
nity must be fixed, and fixed at a possible sum;
and a moratorium must be granted. The foreign
troops, which are eating up the greater part
of what Germany has hitherto contributed, must
be withdrawn from her territory. Germany
must be admitted to the League of Nations.
The Russian Government must be recognised,
and that country too, if it will, be admitted
to the League. The Supreme Council of the Allies
must cease to exist and the League become the
sole channel for the conduct of international
affairs.

CAUSE AND CURE 117

XVI

The brief programme stated in the last section,
and advocated, for months and years past, by every-
one who can understand and feel and desire rightly,
sums up what ought to be done at once, and what
piust be done, if civilisation is to be saved. Next
year, or the year after it may be too late. For
we are drawing every month, every week, every
day nearer to the edge of the abyss. But if we
do succeed in pulling up, and averting immediate
ruin, there remains a long and difficult process
of conversion before our course can be set per-
manently in the right way. For we must learn
to change altogether our traditional view of our
relation to other states and other peoples. Some
words I must say on this subject, though I have
nothing new to say.

So far as the mass of the people is concerned,
those who do the manual and much of the mental
work of the world, this conversion' would perhaps
mainly be a matter of attention. They wiQ have
to cease being the prey of patriotic phrases. For
that purpose, even a httle knowledge would suffice,
if it were accompanied by clear perception. WTiat

118 WAR: ITS NATURE,

has been said in these few pages would be a
sufficient lesson in the real meaning of war to
anyone who would let it penetrate his mind. It
is this penetration that is the difficulty. In the
midst of the fatigue and anxiety of work, the
bellowing of the daily press, the claims of the
" pictures," of betting and of sport, amid the
work and the distraction of life, there is hardly
room for a conviction of the most simple and vital
truth to penetrate. But once it did penetrate,
it would perhaps find the ordinary man ready
enough to accept it. For it would be easy to
convince him, if he would only look, that, who-
ever may gain by war and war-preparedness, he
is losing all the time. It is he who goes as the
common soldier to be slaughtered. It is he who
returns, if he does return, to unemployment, semi-
starvation and all the evils from which the mass
of people have been suffering siace the war ended.
There is no single good of the commbn man which
is served by war. There is no evil which is not
brought upon him by it. And this I think many
of them already see, and all might be madfe to
see if they could be induced to attend. But if
they were really converted, then wars would cease
to occur ; for those who make them would have
lost the material upon which they work.

There remain, however, and there are likely to
remain, for a long time, the comparatively in-
fluential people \\ho form or control Governments.

CAUSE AXD CURE 119

Some of these are the professional soldiers and
sailors who are set apart to prepare the
mechanism of war. So far as these men affect
policy they are bound to affect it in the direction
of war. I do not Ubel them in saying this. The
other day I heard Lord Haldane speak on this topic.
He expressed, to begin \\dth, enthusiasm for the
character of soldiers as he had met them when
he was Secretary for War. But he went on to
say that, if you give control of policy to soldiers,
and in proportion as you do so, you will have war.
The late war he regarded as produced by the
militarism of Germany and Austria. But a similar
danger, he said, exists in all countries wherein the
military element is allowed to dictate policy. I
cite Lord Haldane, because he has been in a
position to prove by experience this truth, which
is, however, evident without it. For even if
we do not attribute to soldiers any love of war,
their business is to forestall by force danger from
force. Soldiers thus imply armaments and think
in terms of armaments. It is they who push on
the continual growth of armies and navies, of
aeroplanes, of poison gas, of all the mechanism
of destruction. And, as we have seen, that very
growth becomes itself a principal cause of war.
A soldier may be by nature the most admirable of
men. I vdU not dispute it. But his mind suffers
almost of necessity, from a fimdamental warping,
which makes of him ^n a^ent of destruction.

120 WAR: ITS NATURE,

The more professional soldiers, the more arma-
ments ; and the more arma,ments the more and
the worse war.

This is a simple truth that anyone can grasp,
-^ once it has been stated, without elaborate educa-
tion or knowledge. Look round, for instance, kt
this moment upon the world. Look no nearer
than across St. George's Channel. At the moment
of my writing these words, society in Ireland is
disintegrating. Life is not safe, property is not
safe. And why? Every Irishman carries arms,
and therefore a fanatic is able, as he is willing, to
murder political opponents, instead of conferring
with them. On the other hand, the police force,
the usual guarantee of order, does not act in that
capacity. The vendetta is either fostered or
endured by the authorities. Disarm the indi-
vidual citizettis in Ireland, and use your police force
properly, and that feature of the situation would
disappear. Well, it is just the same among
states. For example, ever since the armistice,
there has been actual or potential war between
Poland and Russia. Why? Because both sides
have had armed forces watching one another, or
attacking one another. There were causes of
dispute, of course, apart from the forces. But
if there had been no forces there would' have had
to be, sooner or later, settlement by consent. For
though people will kill one another rather than
compromise, they will not indefinitely live in un-

CAUSE AND CURE 121

exciting' discomfort and disorder without even the
chance of ending that by murder. The only
answer I know of to these considerations, would be :
we prefer to live armed, in order that we may
kill one another, rather than compromise. And
if that is really anyone's view, I have no more to
say. I merely invite him to face the real facts.
You may retort, perhaps, " Yes, that would be
all very well, if we had only the ' civilised '
nations to think of. But there is the great world
outside. For example, there are Africans." Yes!
And what are we doing to Africans? The French
are deliberately conscripting and training them in
our methods of warfare in order to bring them
to Europe to fight Europeans I If ever primitive
peoples get strong enough to be a menace to
those we call " civilised " it will be because the
civilised have taught them. The injustices and
cruelties of white men to black, long continued
and still continuing, form one of the most horrible
chapters of history. But, at least, compared to
whites, the blacks are powerless. It is not from
their strength that the problem of war arises. It
is only by the deliberate folly and crime of white
men that they can ever be a menace to them ;
only by training them, that is, to take part in our
wars.

But China? Ah ! What a storv- is there, not
here to be retold ! China is the only peace-
able nation there has ever been. If she be driv^i

122 WAR: ITS NATURE,

to be a " menace " it will be our doing. For
only by us, the strong states, supplying her, for
our purposes, with our guns, our generals, and our
training, could that menace ever take effect. True,
that is just what we are doing, what especially
Japan is doing. But let us not put the blame
on China. If we chose to disarm, instead of arming
China, there could be no trouble in China that
could menace the world, even if China wished to
make it. And of all nations she is the least
likely to wish it. For her people, and perhaps
her's alone, are naturally pacific.

Why then, I repeat, can we not disarm? Is it
the armament firms? Those gentlemen, no doubt,
desire to perpetuate war that they may make profits.
Very likely they do all they can to influence opinion,
as well as policy, in that direction. Every now
and again one comes across instances of their
activities, pursued though they be mostly in the
dark. And no doubt also the men they employ,
by an ironic necessity of their position, would be
opposed to the scrapping of their industry. But
after all, this objection, though not negligible,
could be met easily enough. In Germany the
armament firms are devoting themselves now to
other forms of production. They would do the
same here. And as to the workmen, it would be
much cheaper to pension them off, if they were
thrown out of work, and to pay them for doing
nothing, than to keep them employed on arma-

CAUSE AND CURE 128

ments. The raw material, at any rate, would be
saved, and if they made nothing useful, they would
at least cease from turning out tools of de-
struction. This question of the armament firms
would not be a serious argument against a real
determination to disarm, although it might be —
and no doubt is— an additional force wx>rking along
with inertia, stupidity, fear and bad will, to
stop disarmament.

" But still," you will insist, " we must not dis-
arm. For disarmament would not give absolute
security. Some state might always run amuck
and make a sudden raid with aeroplanes, or
something of the kind." Really, men are very
odd creatures! They think, in panic, of all the
possible evils of conditions hitherto untried. But
they face, with complete indifference, eWls far
worse which all experience shows to follow from
conditions tried. " If we continue to arm, we
shall certainly perish." "Well, perhaps! " and
a shrug of the shoulders. " Disarm then! " " Ah
no — for that would not be quite safe! "

WTiy, I must ask, do you feel safer when
frontiers are bristling with forces, all ready at
any moment to be let loose, than when (as, for
example, along the frontier of Canada and the
United States) there are no forces? Why? Are
more people likely to be killed in the one case
than in the other? Or can it be that, being elderly
civilians, you like to think that the young men

124 WAR: ITS NATURE,

will be there, in the armed world, all ready to be
killed and to save you, whereas in the disarmed
world, it might be you, who suffered? I do not
wish to be offensive, but really, is that it?

*' No," you say indignantly. " The real point
is, that in the world supposed to be disarmed, the
others might cheat." (We, of course, never
should.) Very well. Then what do you say to
this? Constitute an international air -force and an
international fleet, openly and above board, as a
police force, to meet any such possible raid from
some imagined dishonest state. "No I we
-^wouldn't trust that." Heavens I the things you
will trust, and the things you won't. You will
" trust " the arrangement that has produced war
after war and must destroy civilisation and man-
kind, and you won't trust any arrangement, how-
ever sensible, that might save you. Why? Is it
mere stupidity and conservatism?

There is a great deal of that. But we must
recognise that that is not all. The truth is, that
men are not thinking only of defence when they
insist on maintaining armaments. They are think-
ing also of freedom to do what they like to people
weaker than themselves. They are thinking of
objects that can only be obtained by force. I
have said, what is true, and what all history shows
to be true, that no state hitherto has had any
policy except that of taking territory and markets
from other states. I have shown that this state-

CAUSE AND CURE 125

ment, so far from being refuted,, has been
illustrated, on a huge scale, by the treaties that
followed the war for liberty. Well, this policy,
now still that of all states, is the real bottom
cause why states wall not disarm.

126 WAR: ITS NATURE,

XVII

Let us examine a little the way in which this
motive of cupidity works now, in our own time ;
for at different periods in history it has taken
different forms. At the present time it appears as
the economic ambition of great financial corpora-
tions. It is not, however, very easy to get this
issue faced frankly by the ordinary citizen. For it
is commonly mixed up with socialist propaganda,
and to most men who are not socialists any argu-
ment advanced by socialists, however palpably true,
is disregarded as a kind of wickedness. Besides,
the capitalist groups very likely are not themselves
consciously desiring war, nor perhaps even clearly
perceiving that their desires will end in war. They
are pursuing what presents itself to them as a
purely business policy. But they are pursuing it
by pressure on Governments, and in the expectation
of support from Governments. They ally them-
selves, in this, with the simpler imperialism of
soldiers and adventurers, till finally a situation is
produced in which it is possible to appeal to that
blind patriotism of the ordinary man which has
always been at the service of any Government, in

CAUSE AND CURE 127

any cause, so long as the cause is properly-
presented. And so to present it is the business
of the press and the pohticians.

It will be most useful to take one or two
concrete cases of the way in which the economic
interest of powerful groups leads states into war.
Let us take Mexico. For many years past British
and American Combines have been contending to
secure control over the oilfields in that territory.
They have supported one Government, and opposed
another. They have inspired fiHbustering expedi-
tions by land and sea.

As a well-informed French writer puts it :
" The Mexican republic passed its days in peace
so long as the dictator Porfirio Diaz reserved all
railway and oil concessions for the Harriman and
Rockefeller Trusts ; but immediately the legal
Government displayed its intention of negotiating
with European groups as well, civil war broke out.
Extemporary generals, lawyers on the make, placed
themselves with their bands in the pay of the rivals,
and were duly supplied with money and munitions,
the one across the land frontier and the others
through the gulf ports. Any brigand chief lucky
enough to threaten Tampico was sure of getting
subsidies and arms from one side or the other. It
was the period of pronunciamentos in the Spanish
style, in which the gold of the British and
American Trusts played a barely disguised part.
The stmggle still goes on ; the recent assassination

128 WAR: ITS NATURE.

of Carranza was only an incident in it. Rockefeller
and Lord Cowdray continue to make war on each
other, with the help of Mexican condottieri ; and
impassioned discussions of the different constitu-
tional programmes only hide at bottom the oppos-
ing interests of the Standard Oil and the Mexican
Eagle." I

Hitherto, largely through the peaceful policy
of President Wilson, the oil interests have failed
to produce their war. But very possibly it
will come soon. When it does, watch it. You
will find that some episode will occur which jwill
be represented by the press— prompted by the oil
interests — as an insult to the American flag, as
an outrage on American citizens, as one of those
things that immediately stir the pugnacious instincts
of the ordinary man. He will begin to cry for
satisfaction — of course through the mouth of the
press — ^and the cry will spread like an infectious
disease. Finally, the ultimatum will be presented,
the forces raised, the invasion consummated.
Months and perhaps years of hideous guerrilla war
will follow, passions getting more and more
inflamed the while, atrocities becoming more
terrible, and reason, humanity and common sense
retiring every day before the flood of hatred.
Then, at last, the Americans will be victorious.
They will annex Mexico. And the only people
who will profit will be. the shareholders of the oil-

» Francis Delaisi : Oil, p. 28 (George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.).

CAUSE AND CURE 129

combine— if indeed even they profit. Because, in
the course of the war, most likely the oilfields wilj
have been devastated as they were, for instance, in
Roumania during the late war.

Thus much the ordinary outsider can learn, or
safely infer, about Mexico and the United States.
But there is much he cannot learn, because such'
intrigues are carried on as secretly as possible.
It is quite possible that the directors of the
Standard Oil Trust, or of Dutch-Shell, might
express moral indignation at the notion that they
were fostering war ; it is even possible that they
might feel it. They would perhaps say they were
only standing on their " Rights." And, of course,
if that happens to involve a war, they cannot
help it !

We will take another case more pertinent to the
British Empire. In one respect that Empire, in
the past, has pursued a comparatively sane policy ;
after annexing by force a quarter of the globe, it
has, on the whole, during the last half century
or so, avoided the snare of pursuing a monopoly
of trade and raw materials. But of late years
ominous signs have been appearing of a different
policy. Thus in 191 9 there was imposed, on palm
kernels from British West Africa, a differential
duty on all exports to countries lying outside the
Empire, with the view of securing the whole
product for England, in order that the oil seeds
might be crushed there and there only. " If," said

180 WAR: ITS NATURE,

a Minister, " a duty of £2 per ton be found insuffi-
cient to divert the trade to this country, the amount
should be raised until the duty is adequate to effect
its purpose ; and this determination should be
made clear from the outset."- " This duty," says
a well-informed writer, " was imposed not in the
interests of the colonies but in the supposed
interests of a small group of manufacturers within
the British Commonwealth." Now observe ! The
immediate effect was to penaUse the native
producer. He got less for his produce, because
the British manufacturer was given a monopoly
of its purchase. It was , perhaps the first open
attempt of recent years, though it may not be the
last, to exploit the native producer in the interests,
or supposed interests, of the British manufacturer.
And it is with the greatest satisfaction that those
who care for peace will have noted the abohtion of
the differential duty in 1922. It was, however, then
stated, by the Undersecretary for the Colonies, that
the object for which it had been originally imposed,
the diversion to England of the trade in an " empire
product," had been achieved. And if that is so,
those who believe in running the Empire as a
monopolistic concern are Hkely to revert to similar
policies. It is therefore worth while to point out
that such policies are war-pohcies. For in conse-
quence of them it can be represented, to and by
capitalists and Governments, that the pohtical
ownership of territory is essential to economic

CAUSE AND CURE 181

prosperity ; that, therefore, the ownership of such
territory by another state is an injury to one's own
state : that, therefore, one must fight other states
in order that one's own state may be, or become,
the owner. And that opinion, together with arma-
ments, is a principal cause of modern wars. It
is for that reason that Morocco, for example, oiearly
produced a European war in 1905, and 191 1 . The
French, assisted by their alHes, were determined
to secure the political control of that country |in
order to exploit it economically. The Germans
not unnaturally objected. Similarly with Persia.
The Russians and British divided that country into
" spheres of influence " and decided that all public
works, such as railways, should be carried out
only by the capital and industry of the two
interested nations. Once more Germany objected.
Was it not natural? In every part of the worldi,
yet unexploited and unowned by the industrial
states, one finds, for years past, and progressively
in the last ten years, these motives controlling
policy. They are primarily the motives of capital-
istic groups. But those groups have influence with
Governments. And they associate with themselves
the more disinterested passions of soldiers and
adventurers, to whom it is a kind of axiom, self-
e\-ident, that it is somehow good that their country,
and not some other, should acquire by force any-
thing that is going in the world.

The motiye of profit thus illustrated may be

132 WAR: ITS NATURE,

found lurking under many of the wars of recent
years. It was a strong element in the Tripoli
war, in the war with the Matabele in South Africa,
engineered by Cecil Rhodes, in the Russo-Japanese
war (where the prize was to be the exploitation of
China). It is not indeed the sole cause of war.
Into some wars^ such as those in the Balkans, it
has perhaps hardly entered at all. But it was a
considerable part of the causation of the great
European war. For, firstly, previous friction in
Europe, for example over Morocco, or Persia, was
due to it, in whole or in part ; and, secondly, the
desire of the British to ruin German trade, under
the mistaken idea of benefitting their own, though
it was not strong enough by itself to engender the
war, was one of the contributory rills that fed the
great torrent. In the peace treaties this economic
notion became very prominent. For those treaties
gave the victorious Powers the right, which they
have exercised ruthlessly, to expel their German
rivals, by force, from their possessions and their
businesses over a great part of the world. Yes !
the reader may hear, if he listens carefully, behind
the patriotic cries of the press, behind the shrieks
of wounded and dying men, giving their lives, jas
they think, for freedom and their country, the cold
miscalculations of business men risking the
certainty of general loss for small possibilities of
individual gain.

CAUSE AND CURE 188

XVIII

Very well. But, this being true, what are you
going to do about it? Are you going to prefer,
at some given moment, your p>ersonal profit, with
the chance of war looming in the distance, to your
personal loss, or the absence of your gain, for the
sake of peace? It is really, at bottom, in these
kind of terms that the question comes up for many
of us. For instance, you were interested, let us
say, in the Co-operative Wholesale Society. That
society was profiting, let us suppose (I do not
know whether it "was, but it conceivably might
be), by the export duties, which gave the monopoly
of crushing palm kernels from West Africa to
British firms. We will suppose, for the sake of
argument, that in consequence you got some small
pecuniary profit. Suppose you did, would you have
been willing to vote for abolishing that policy (which
makes for war) at the cost of losing that profit?
Would you? It is really in that form that ultimate
political questions should be put to an elector, if
they were put fairly. Or again : you are a share-
holder, let us say, in the company which has some-
thing like a monopoly of the oil of Mesopotamia-.

184 ^ WAR: ITS NATURE,

Are you prepared to abandon this advantage for
the sake of peace? It is not, I know, so simple
as all that, but at bottom it is something like that.
Is your personal advantage of more value to you
than the peace of the world? Or we will put it
another way. Are you detennined to look only to
the point of your personal advantage, hoping —
perhaps not even dishonestly, perhaps only lazily —
that the consequences to the peace of the world
may not really result, and pretending that, anyhow,
you are not responsible?

I put this matter as one for the individual
elector, as a conflict between his interest and his
love of peace, or, which is the same thing, between
his short-sighted view of his own advantage, and
the real advantage, in the long run, of his children,
his fellow citizens, and, really, of himself. If
political questions could be so put and so judged,
we should at least know where we are. But they
are never put so simply, they are put in a fog of
confusion, misrepresentation and passion. The
Imperialist, especially (and he will long be with
us) prefers fog, both for himself and for others.
For in the fog flourish, like fungi, the strong and
irrational emotions on which he lives. All sorts
of mean, short-sighted interests of individuals and
of groups associate themselves with his propaganda.
But at bottom it has a kind of fuliginous dis-
interestedness. He just wants (and he would think
it a kind of blasphemy to question the goodness

CAUSE AND CURE 135

of his want) to belong to something very big, very
strong and able, billing to assert its will by force
against all other beings. Such an attitude means
war. And such people will never be induced to
face the fact of what war is. If ever they think
of peace, they imagine it, vaguely, as somehow
established by a British Empire imposing itself on
the world. And as that is a very remote ideal, it
does not trouble them in their actual pursuit of
war. The fact that war, under modern conditions,
must mean the end of the British Empire, along
Avith all the rest of what we call civilisation, does
not alarm them, for they refuse to look at it.
" After me, the deluge. The Empire is my creed."

These are the kind of men we have to deal
with. But their only strength is what they derive
from their influence with you. It is your hesita-
tion, between this kind of thing and the argument
I am advancing, that keeps everything in suspense,
and hangs us all over the abyss. '

At this moment, for instance, there is proceeding
(I do not know whether to success) a campaign
for what is called Imj>erial " preference." WTiat
does this really mean? It means that the states
of the British Empire, owning a quarter of the
globe and an enormous proportion of its raw
products (though in that Empire there are only
some sixty million white men) desire to make, so
far as they can, of that portion of the globe, a
closed presence.. But to do that is, quite plainly.

186 WAR: ITS NATURE,

to invite a combination of other states against the
British Empire, and to prepare another world war.
This argument will leave an Imperialist cold. He
will, first of all, pooh-pooh it ; and then, when it
is pressed home, say to himself in his own heart :
"Well, why not? That is the price of Empire."
Yes, and it is also the end of mankind. You do
''not like these summary statements? No. But it
is they, and they alone, that bring out the essential
facts. And it is the refusal to face these facts that
leads us on to catastrophe.

CAUSE AND CURE 187

XIX

The arguments of the preceding sections lead
us, quite simply and inevitably, to certain prin-
ciples of international policy which must be
adopted by all states, and especially by the
British Empire, if there is ever to be peace in
the world. They may be summed up in the
following rules to which the members of a true
league of nations would have to subscribe : —

First, that they will not impose anywhere in
their dominions, and least of all in their colonial
territories, any duties intended to favour any state,
eve', though it were their own state, against other
states .

Secondly, that they will not endeavour to secure
for themselves or their friends a monopoly or any
special preference in raw materials, such as oil,
or iron, or gold, or cotton, or phosphates, or any-
thing else ; but, on the contrary, will agree either
to sell all such things openly to those, of any
nationality, that will pay best for them ; or, in the
case of necessities, of which the supply is limited,
to distribute them, on some equitable principle,
among those who have need of them-

188 WAR: ITS NATURE

Thirdly, that they will not give any special
advantage to their own nationals to invest capital,
and get contracts, anywhere in their own territories,
but will permit a genuine free bidding on the part
of all nationalities.

If this policy were adopted, the ownership of
territory would become, what it ought to be, a
responsibility without advantage ; states would
cease to compete for it ; and the principal cause
of wars would be removed.

Now these propositions thus briefly laid down
may possibly receive a kind of lazy assent from
many readers whose interests are not immediately
involved. But many of those who understand their
implications, would (if they thought there was
any chance of their being adopted) be filled with
a genuine rage. For to many Imperialists and to
many members of the profit-making classes, it is a
matter of course that an Empire exists, if not
solely, yet in part, to put money into the pockets
of the people at home. I will cite only one
sentence, uttered in Parliament, and expressing the
real, almost instinctive view of many well- to -do -
men : " The land belongs to the Empire, does it
not? And the people who live on it grow nuts,
do they not? If a mian or a nation own the land,
and has to look after the people who live on it,
and protect them' from the Gennans or other
barbarians, it is perfectly right that that man or
nation should have the first or a better chance of

CAUSE AND CURE 189

buying the nuts off that land than anybody else,"
This discourse of nuts gives the whole argument
in a nutshell. Whether the gentleman thus speak-
ing knew that what he was advocating was the
perpetuation of war to the destruction of mankind,
I do not know. But it is not likely ; for such
men (who are average and typical men) do not
think of the remoter consequences of their principles.
But there can be no reasonable doubt that the
first stage must lead to the last. Let territory be
seized for that purpose^ and held in that spirit,
and there can never be peace in the world. But,
a|S I have abundantly shown, and as no one really
ventures to dispute, the continuance of war means
the end of civilisation, if not of mankind.

140 WAR: ITS NATURE,

The account I have given in the previous pages
of the causes of war between states is, I believe,
true and complete. But there is another kind of
war— the war called " civil." It has been waging,
or is now waging, in many countries since the
Great War ; in Russia principally ; but also in
Hungary, in Germany, in Ireland. In Italy, the
fighting between fascist! and socialists is a mild
form of it.« It is a fire burning under ground, and
sometimes breaking out on the surface, in almost
all the states of the world. And, plainly, its causes
are different from those of international war. For
some reason, not very easy to understand, once
one has begun to think about it, citvil war is
commonly regarded as something much worse than
international war. It has, no doubt, all the evils
that attach to all war, and those evils, in this
case, cannot be thrust out of sight into some other
country, where they are not felt by those who
maintain the war. That perhaps is why it is
thought to be worse than foreign war. But in
fact it is, in one -important respect, better. It is
usually about something that really matters to those

» The fascist! have now, by armed revolution, seized power for
themselves. This is what the Bolshevists did in Russia.

CAUSE AND CURE 141

who wage it. This fact is clearest in the case of
social revolutions, where the object is to better
the position of oppressed classes. In our time, the
greatest example of that is the Russian revolution.
I cannot, in this place, discuss these wars which
arise from intolerable misgovernment by privileged
minorities. They are altogether different from the
international wars with which I am at present con-
cerned, and it is possible that they may fill the
near future with events at present undreamed of.
For the deanoralisation caused by foreign war is
the readiest cause of civil war, and of that
demoralisation we have our fill. I will therefore
only say, in passing, that the experience of the
Russian revolution holds out little hope that any
result other than final destruction could be attained
by similar movements in the western European
states. For these, and especially England, are
far more dependent on foreign trade than ever
Russia was, and far less capable of survi\'ing its
collapse. Yet even in Russia millions have
perished, and are perishing, of famine.

The civil wars of which I wish to speak' are
those more intimately connected with my immediate
subject. They are those where a people, included
by force under a Government to which they object,
endeavours to throw off its rule. These wars,
if they have been successful, have commonly
received the approval of historians, unless the
historian belongs to the country against whom the

142 WAR: ITS NATURE,

rebellion took place. Thus, for example, the wars
of Italy against Austria are usually praised, though'
not by Austrians. So are the wars of the Poles
against Russians, though not by Russians ; and
so are the Irish " rebellions," though not by
Englishmen. For most states disapprove of the
oppression of a people by other states, though
approving such oppression by themselves. For
when they do it themselves they do not admit that
it is oppression.

Now what has to be said, first, about these
wars, is this. The peoples now striving to free
themselves were enslaved originally by international
war. They were once free, and then Were
made by force part of another state. It is
thus, for example, that Poland was partitioned,
that Korea was seized by Japan, that Ireland
or India was taken by England. Such acts
of violence, the consequence and the object of
international war, seldom result, even after years
and centuries, in a real acquiescence on the part'
of the conquered people. Ireland, Poland, the
Slav and Czech peoples of the old Austrjo:-
Hungarian Empire, are familiar illustrations of
this fact. We begin, now, to see the same thing
in India and Egypt, and it will perhaps not be
long before the black races of Africa give us
another proof. International war, evil in every
other respect, produces also the specific evil that
it engenders what are called civil wars,

CAUSE AND CURE 148

Now the late war, though, as we have seen, it
originated in the lust for power on the part of
states, in their ambitions and their consequent
fears, has, nevertheless, done something towards
setting free oppressed peoples. It has recon-
stituted Poland, and it has detached from the
Au St ro- Hungarian Empire the Slav and Czech and
Italian peoples. It has also, no doubt, included,
against their wiU, in the new states, reluctant
minorities of the races formerly dominant. This
is especially true of the new Roumania, the new
Czech-Slovakia and the new Poland ; and it is
also true of Italy, which has included in its
boundaries the Germans of the Tyrol. Still, when
all is said, the states of the new Europe are nearer
than those of the old to being what are called
" national " states.

Will this be a good thing? No one can yet
say. For everything depvends on the behaviour of
these new states. There are two dangers before
them. First, that of aggressive patriotism. It is
a commonplace of history that no sooner has a
state hberated itself from oppression than it starts
out to oppress others. We see this everywhere ;
in Athens and Sparta, for example, when they had
saved themselves from the Persians ; in Spain,
when it had thrown off the Moors ; in France,
when it had expelled the EngUsh. Even the new
Italy has produced its jingos, urging that a success-
ful nationalism must be followed by an aggressive

144 WAR: ITS NATURE,

imperialism. And we have yet to see whether
America, now, and perhaps for many centuries to
come, the strongest state in the world, will be able
to resist this temptation.

The first danger, then, to peace, caused by the
creation of the new states, is that they may become
Imperialist. There is nothing new to be said about
this ; it will be merely the taking up by the new
states of the bad traditions of the old ones. And
these new states, being inexperienced, may now
be a greater menace than the old.

But there is another danger. These new states,
as -we have seen, include recalcitrant minorities of
different races who object to being held under
their rule. This will be a source of new wars^
unless tlje pohcy of the new states is going to be
better than that of the old empires, out of which
they have been formed. Besides this, there is the
ambition of the old states that have been destroyed
to recover their territories. Thus, in Hungary,
large numbers of people appear to be possessed
by the idea of a war of revenge and recovery.

It is difficult to estimate the force of these
motives for war. Everything will depend upon
the behaviour of the new states, first to other
states, and next to the alien minorities included in
their populations. But some observations are
worth making. First, experience has shown that
it was a mistake (though it may have been one
unavoidable) to create new states in absolute

CAUSE AND CURE 145

sovereignty, instead of making it a condition of
their recognition that they, in their turn, should
recognise obligations to one another. We come
here upon one of the worst prejudices which attach
to the theory and the passions of states ; the
prejudice that it belongs to their nature, and is
essential to their self-respect, that they should not
be bound, in their conduct to other states, by any
rules other than such as they choose to adopt them-
selves. This theory, supported by these passions,
is commonly called " sovereignty." And it is time
that it was abandoned. No state ought to be
sovereign, for every state ought to be bound by
rules, governing its relations to other states, which
it cannot alter without their consent. For instance,
it should have been (as we have said) a condition
of the recognition of the new states formed out
of the Austrian Empire that they should trade
freely with one another, instead of setting up the
wall of tariffs which has done so much, during the
last few years, to increase the misery of that part
of the world. If the reply be, as very likely it
may be, that the states would not have accepted
such a condition, that only shows how the idea of
sovereignty, and the passions behind it, Hes at the
root of many of our troubles. The old Austro-
Hungarian Empire, with all its grave defects, did
at least maintain an economic union throughout
a great part of East Europe. Its disruption, iji
destroying that, has introduced a flood of new evils.

146 WAR: ITS NATURE,

/ It is then, to begin with, a condition of a

better order in the world, that this theory
^ of sovereignty should be modified. The theory,;
of course, is that of International Law. But it is
built upon an emotional fact, and that fact is the
pride of nations. They hate to be bound by any-
thing except their own imperfect, aggressive, and
usually unjust will. If this attitude is to continue,
war will continue. But in fact the attitude is being
modified. The League of Nations, for example,
though it does not directly contravene natipnal
sovereignty, does nevertheless undermine it, and
rightly so. Again, what is the position of the
self-governing dominions in the British Empire?
Are they " sovereign? " I fancy that they would
say so. But, if so, sovereignty means something
different from what used to be implied by the word.
Or again, what about the new Egypt? That state
is subject, in foreign pohcy, to the control of
England. Yet the British Government officially
declares it to be " sovereign." Sovereignty is
clearly becoming more and more indefinite in its
meaning. That that indefiniteness should continue
and increase, until the word has lost all meaning,
would be the best augury of a world intending to
keep the peace.

One of the most important cases in which the
sovereignty of states has been encroached upon, in
the recent settlement of Europe, is that which con-
cerns the position of minorities of alien races. The

CAUSE AND CURE 147

new states created by the war have signed an
agreement that they will treat such minorities fairly
in matters of education, reli^on and the like ;
that they will not, in fact, penalise them for being
alien. To say this is one thing, to do it another.
But that it should have been said is something^
perhaps much. Moreover, if the obligation is not
complied with, the minorities can appeal to the
League of Nations.

Such legal obligations, it is true, are only of
value if the states concerned live up to them. But
they do, in themselves, set up a pressure in their
own favour. We need not be dupes. .We have
not, merely by words, secured deeds. Yet at least
we have written down in black" and white that the
deeds ought to be. That is something. How
much it is, the future will show. And what the
future shows will be whether or no one of the
causes of war is to persist. For it was the treat-
ment of Croats and Serbs by Hungarians that was
part cause of the war of 191 4. And the treat-
ment of Germans by Czecho- Slovaks, or of
Magyars by Roumanians, or of Lithuanians by
Poles, may be part cause of another and final
Armageddon.

On this question, then, of nationahty, the truth
seems to be as foUows :

I. It is desirable thaf, so far as possible, people
belonging to a single nation should be grouped
together in a self-governing body.

148 WAR: ITS NATURE,

2. This self-government, however, need not be
and should not be absolute. It should be limited
by the common needs and obligations of all states,
as expressed in the covenant, and the subsequent
agreements, of a league of nations. States ought
not to be " sovereign " in the old sense of that
term. Their absolute freedom should be progres-
sively limited by the needs of the world.

3. Where (as, of necessity, in many parts of
Europe must be the case) people of one race are
included in a state controlled by another, these
minorities should be given guarantees against
oppression, and those guarantees should be put
under the guardianship of the League of Nations.
Actually, in the case of the new states, this has
been done.

CAUSE AND CURE 149

XXI

At this point, since I am speaking to Englishmen,
it may be worth while to say a few words about
what is called the British Empire. The name
is only partially appropriate. For the greater part
of the area of the Empire is occupied by white
men, connected only by the loosest political tie
with Great Britaiji. So far, the " Empire " is a
union of free communities, and might more
properly be termed, as it sometimes is, the British
Commonwealth. On the other hand, 'the greater
part of the population is included in what reaUy is
an Empire, for it 13 govern^ not by itself, .but
by British administrators.

Now there are certain pohcies that might be
adopted by this huge agglomeration that would
be definitely war-pohcies. One of these is what
is called imperial preference. I have already
spoken of this, and shown how the attempt to
make of an area of one quarter of the globe,
spread dispersedly over its surface, a closed
preserve for British citizens, must make the
Empire a target for the hostility of all other
states. And it is noticeable that an argument

150 WAR: ITS NATURE,

sometimes used in favour of that policy is
precisely that it would make the Empire stronger
in war. Here, as always, the anticipation of
war prompts policies that cause war. The
notion that we have a '" right " to adopt Imperial
preference proceeds from that theory and passion
of sovereignty which I have already discussed.
.We have the right only by a bad and dangerous
tradition. Such Rights are Wrongs from the point
of view of civilisation and mankind. And pnly
a recognition of that fact can save us from
destruction.

I turn next more particularly to the Empire
proper, as distinguished from the Union of
Dominions peopled by white men. The Empire,
in this restricted but accurate sense, comprises
some four hundred million people, black or brown
or yellow, who are governed, more or less auto-
cratically, by England. This is 'apt to be, I will
not say forgotten, but ignored, when we boast
of our free Empire. But it is a fact, and one of
the most difficult facts with which we have to
deal.

On this subject I have, here and now, only one
thing to say. The justification of our position as
rulers would be that we should put first the interests
of the native peoples, and second our own ; and
that as, or if, from our education and our rule',
they begin to claim the right of self-government,
we should gladly and freely concede it. For since

CAUSE AND CURE 151

Empire, properly understood, would be a burden
and not a profit, we might be glad enough to lay
it down when the people we had ruled were ready
to take it up. If all the European states accepted,
in practice, that principle, which they are apt to
profess to accept in theory, it is clear that they
would never make wars among themselves to take
territory in Africa or Asia. That they do make
such wars shows that they expect to profit by what
they take. The record of no state in this matter
is very clean. It shows that all of them have
taken the territories of primitive men mainly for
the sake of the profit they expected to make, either
in Imperial defence, or in trade and finance, or
both. Why else did the French" take Morocco?
Why else the British Egypt? WTiy else the parti-
tioning of the German colonies in Africa aniong
the victors? For the pretence that their only object
was to deliver the natives from German oppression
is the kind of h)-ppcrisy one wonders that statesmen
think it worth while to maintain, seeing that
nobody believes them, any more than they believe
themselves.

On this tremendous and tragic theme of cruelty
and crime, we cannot here digress. But this is
to be said. So long as the ownership of African"
and Asiatic territory is regarded as a pecuniary
or military advantage to the owning state, so long
will competition for those territories be a cause
of war. The system of " mandates " was intended

152 WAR: ITS NATURE,

to put an end to that. It might succeed, if it
were taken setiously and honestly. There, too,
as yet, the balance hangs trembhng. If the
mandatory system be developed into reaUty, the
possession of such territories will become, what it
ought to be, a " white man's burden " instead of
a white man's profit ; and then the states will not
intrigue against one another in order to take up
the burden. If otherwise, we are faced by the
double risk of insurrectiions by the native peoples^
and wars among their masters.

In conclusion, it is only just to say of the
British that iti their Imperial policy, for something
like a century past, there has been a continuous
pressure away from dominion and exploitation, to
trustee-ship and self-government. The two policies
continue to contend with one another, and it would
be hazardous to say that the latter has finally
prevailed over the former. The struggle has been
fiercest over Ireland, and in th^ very latest years,
the contradictions there, the oscillations between
the one course and the other, have been such as
have astonished and perplexed the world. In
1 92 1 we were endeavouring to govern Ireland by
murder and theft. In the same year we offered
her a constitution as free as that of Australia.
The offer may have come too late. But if, by
good chance, it succeeds, we shall have solved a
problem and done something to redeem a crime
that has extended over seven centuries.

CAUSE AND CURE 153

In India and in Egypt, in these last years, we
have witnessed the same oscillations, violence
alternating with concessions. But in both those
cases the final trend has been towards self-
government. If that movement should succeed,
and establish itself, a ver>' great step will have
been taken towards the stable peace of the world.
But one thing should be clear. If we cannot
govern people without massacring them, then we
ought to go, and leave them alone. For Empire
has no justification, unless the people governed
are content with it, and unless it leads to, and is
willing in the end to grant, self-government, within
the scope and restraints of a League of Nations. I
will add, to emphasise my point, that if the con-
stitution granted to Ireland fails to come into effect,
through the obstinate resistance of a great section
of the Irish nation, then we ought not to intervene
by force to impose it, or to impose some more
autocratic form of British Government- We
ought to refer the whole question to the League
of Nations, and accept the decision of that body.
The Irish were ready to do that in 191 8. We
refused. Have not events proved that we were
wrong ?

154 WAR: ITS NATURE,

XXII

At this point I may close my argument, for
any further elaboration of it would lead into a
number of special problems and a mass of detail.
But none of these can be fruitfully approached,
still less settled, until we have decided whether we
intend to have a world with war or without it.
The main object will determine all the minor
objects, and the general policy the policy in detail.
I do not believe it to be possible any longer to halt
between two opinions, to want to abolish war, and
yet to prepare for it, to want liberty and yet to
impose Empire, to want civilisation, and yet to
cheat, steal and murder. I am not pretending
that, at the best, we have before us an easy task
or a certainty of salvation ; but I am sure that,
until we face the main issue and come out whole-
heartedly for the abolition of war, we cannot
move a step on the road to security. I have given
my reasons for this belief as clearly as I can, and
I do not see that any further elaboration could
strengthen them. In one sense, the case is very
simple, complex though it becomes as soon as a
general truth begins to be applied to special cases.

CAUSE AND CURE 155

Do you accept the general truth? That is the
question I am putting to you. If you do not, do
you know why? And are you prepared to defend
your position? In the course of my book I have,
I daresay, been provocative, without intending it ;
but I have had only one purpose, to force
the attention of busy indifferent men upon the
tremendous issue that faces us. I apologise freely
and gladly beforehand for any imperfections in
my manner of presenting the case ; but I am sure
that the case is there. I am sure that I am deaUng
with reality, and with terrible reality. I am sure
that you, and all of us, are concerned. I ask you
to put aside any irritation you may feel with me,
and concentrate your thoughts on the tremendous
question. WTiich is it to be?

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